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Contents

Tony Brown Reviews "On the Screen of Eternity": Some Aspects of R. S. Thomas's Prose Mary Casey The Kingfisher's Wing Charles Lock GLEN CAVALIERO 60 "To Ravage and Redeem": Maiden Castle and the Violation of Form 16 Vilhclm Ekclund The Second Light CEDRIC HENTSCHEL 61 Peter Christensen Wessex 1272: History in John Cowper Noel Kennedy Thomas Powys's The Brazen Head 28 Henry Vaughan: Poet of Revelation GARETH ROBERTS 63 H. W. Fawkner John Cowper Powys and Ontotheology 35 Joan H. Harding From Fox Howe to Fairy Hill. Ben Jones Matthew Arnold's Celtic Connections John Cowper Powys in Mexico 49 BARBARA DENNIS 64

Patricia Vaughan Dawson John Halperin Gissing: A Life in Books Etchings and Sculptures Suggested by ANDREW HASSAM 66 Scenes from J. C. Powys's Porius 50 Caitlin Thomas with George Tremlett Reviews 60 Caitlin: Life with Dylan Thomas JAMES A. DAVIES 67 Notes on Contributors 79 Meic Stephens, ed. The Oxford Companion to the Literature of Wales PETER DAVISON 69 Roland Mathias Anglo- Welsh Literature: An Illustrated History JOHN HARRIS 70 Richard Poole Richard Hughes: Novelist PAUL BENNETT MORGAN 72 Randall Stevenson The British Novel Since the Thirties: An Introduction WILLIAM BAKER 74 Jeremy Hooker The Presence of the Post JOHN WILLIAMS 76

The Powys Review Number 21 1987-1988 Volume Vli

Tony Brown "On the Screen of Eternity": Some Aspects of R. S. Thomas's Prose

Writing in his autobiography, Neb, of his the Church in Wales weekly, Y Llan.4 arrival in 1967 at Aberdaron, R. S. Thomas Other essays followed over the next seven says that he had come to' 'the end of his own years in the same j ournal and in YFflam, the personal pilgrimage".' Geographically, he latter under the editorship of Euros Bowen. had come almost full circle: from Holyhead, Perhaps more significant than these early where he spent his childhood; then (after essays were some of the letters, in Welsh, university at Bangor and theological college which R. S. Thomas wrote to YHan in the in Cardiff) to posts as curate in the 1930s at immediate post-war years, letters which Chirk and Maelor Saesneg on the English indicate another area of difficulty on his border; and later westwards, to livings at journey: his consciousness that the Church Manafon in Montgomeryshire, Eglwysfach in which he served was failing to provide near Aberystwyth and finally Aberdaron, moral and spiritual leadership to Wales as a with Holyhead visible on a clear day across nation at an important point in her history. the sea to the north. But more importantly His nationalism and his pacifism come R. S. Thomas's pilgrimage, his search for 2 together in his criticism of the Church in "the real Wales of my imagination", Wales's continued acquiescence in the face begun as he gazed westwards towards Wales of contemporary militarism, an acquies- from his exile at Maelor, has been a spiritual cence which he sees as typifying the Church and imaginative journey, one that has taken in Wales's servile attitude towards England him across the boundary between two and its traditions: cultures. It has not been an easy journey. The . . . One can expect to have leadership and major obstacle on R. S. Thomas's pilgrim- inspiration from the Church, of course, but age, of course, was the fact that his had been after all the un-Welsh attitude of the Church an English-speaking upbringing. As he em- in Wales is only a reflection of the extensive anglicisation which has infiltrated the whole phasized in an essay in 1958, "without the nation. And although the trouble in Dolgellau key of the Welsh language one and all must is very unpleasant,5 we ought to welcome this needs pass by the door that opens on the real opportunity for the Church to give a positive Wales"; without the language, he says, one 3 lead in matters of importance like these. remains "a dyn dieithr, a stranger". It is Nobody can deny that our nation is caught perhaps easy today, when opportunities for in two minds at a fateful time in her history. learning Welsh are so numerous, to under- Despite the two ugly wars which have gone by, estimate Thomas's determined struggle, there is continuous talk of another war, and through the early years of the War, to considerable preparation in that direction. In master the language. One has to admire the the face of all this there are some preaching sheer stubbornness which kept him trav- pacifism, some others demanding Welsh elling every week from Maelor all the way to regiments, while the majority of our young Llangollen to have his Welsh lesson {Neb, p. people will be quietly joining the British army. Is the Church in Wales giving any con- 40). Remarkably, by 1945 Thomas was sistent guidance in these circumstances? It sufficiently fluent to publish his first pieces isn't. It is accepting things as they are, as it did of prose in Welsh, some short essays on the before and during the last war. How did it birds of the Welsh countryside, published in behave on that occasion? How many of its 6 "On the Screen of Eternity" leaders, how many of its priests stood for prose is ultimately secondary; it is in poetry peace and justice? Didn't they follow that he responds most fully to life "in all its England servilely, praying for victory and variety and its complexity"—and yet R. S. singing the English national anthem on every Thomas has published only one poem in occasion, while more than one of its priests Welsh, "Y Gwladwr" ["The Country- joined the "Home Guard". man'^ in YFflam in 1950. ("The last two I was more or less silent at that time. It was a very difficult time. But now, despite the lines were praised by Gwenallt", he told an interviewer in 1973, "but one swallow trouble and the threats, there's some kind of 8 peace in the world, and everybody has a duty doesn't make a summer".) Here is a third to consolidate this peace. Wales is, as was said difficulty which Thomas has had to con- above, caught in two minds, but she has, as a front on his long pilgrimage. He explains in small nation, an inclination towards pacifism "If I knew the language . . ." and "The and friendship. If the Church were ready to Creative Writer's Suicide" ["Hunanladd- do its duty as the Church of Christ, it ought to iad y Lienor'', 1977] that he feels he lacks the take advantage of the situation, and give intuitive sensitivity to the intricacies and every support to that inclination. But, alas, it nuances of the language which the native prefers to leave things as they are. And things Welsh-speaker has and, therefore, he lacks as they are smell of Englishness and English- the confidence to make the critical discrim- ness is under suspicion now, because it has a bad reputation, not only in Wales, but in the inations which are a fundamental part of the world. process of poetic composition. The distress, the sense of inner division, which this sit- The purpose of this letter is not merely to denounce the English, although no small fault uation must have caused Thomas over the lies with them, because there are many of years—the feeling that he cannot give full them in the Church in Wales, and they have a expression to his most profound thoughts strong voice in church matters. And the maj- and feelings in the language which repre- ority of them are contemptuous of the Welsh sents so much to him and in which he now nation. In this they are discourteous, if not lives his life—would seem to have grown un-Christian. Why is it necessary to have a more acute as his view of the role of the bilingual church in an area which is wholly Anglo-Welsh poet, the Welsh poet who Welsh, just because there's a rich English writes in English, has changed. person living there? If he wants to worship in the local church, let him learn its language. As a young man Thomas felt that there But it's necessary to remember that some of were' 'signs that the mantle of writers like T. the fault is ours also. If we don't respect our- Gwynn Jones and W. J. Gruffydd" was selves, if we don't have enough backbone to falling on those young writers, like himself, withstand the English tide, we can't expect anything else but scorn.6 writing not in Welsh but in English ("Some Contemporary Scottish Writing", 1946) The attitudes towards war and towards and that if they studied the work of the England are ones with which we are familiar Welsh-language writers of the past these in R. S. Thomas's work, but until Neb, Anglo-Welsh poets might create in English a written some years after his retirement, we poetry which was distinctively Welsh, hear little in Thomas's prose about his atti- rooted in a tradition which was non-urban, tudes towards the Church and its role in non-industrial. As Ned Thomas has pointed Welsh life. But the misgivings expressed out, however, even by 1952 Thomas had 9 here clearly continued to exist. shifted his ground considerably and by To date, R. S. Thomas has published over 1977 ("The Creative Writer's Suicide") his thirty essays, reviews and lectures in Welsh anguish is clearly to be heard. In writing of —not counting letters to the press—as well the Welshman who has learned Welsh and as his autobiography. But, as he says in an who is then tempted to write in Welsh "in essay entitled "If I knew the language ..." order to prove to himself and to the public ["Pemedrwnyriaith.. .", 1980],7 for him that he is a true Welshman", Thomas is "On the Screen of Eternity" 7 clearly writing out of a personal dilemma: move to Aberdaron in 1967, the subject- "He will never become as good a writer in matter of his poetry changed; thereafter, his that language as he could be in English". poetry concerns itself less with the cultural R. S. Thomas is thus, poignantly, the victim and political plight of Wales than with issues of his own unrelenting idealism: for him the both more universal and more private: with ultimate duty of the writer is to strive to man's essential loneliness and his search for create a masterpiece, to realize in words his God. Thomas's concern for Wales and her vision of the truth.10 For a Welsh poet such a future has not, of course, decreased; if any- masterpiece will be in Welsh "a work so thing it has become more urgent. But, Welsh as to defy every attempt to translate it feeling that he has come home to "the real successfully into another language, espec- Wales" for which he had long searched, able ially English" ("If I knew the language now in Llyn to live his life almost wholly in ..."), but such expertise Thomas feels to be Welsh, he seems to have chosen to voice that beyond him and so, .in his own eyes, he is concern not in English but in Welsh and not, unworthy of the title Welsh writer. "Who therefore, in poetry but in prose. Since 1972 has suffered, if I have not suffered? For I and, significantly perhaps, his account in bear in my body the marks of this conflict" "Y Llwybrau Gynt" of his early life and his (The Creative Writer's Suicide"). first steps on the road to becoming a true When one looks at R. S. Thomas's earliest Welshman, he has published very little prose prose in Welsh, the essays in Y Llan and Y in English, speaking instead directly and Fflam, it is clear that he himself had been passionately to the Welsh-speaking Welsh doing what he was urging other young themselves, through essays, letters to the Anglo-Welsh poets to do, namely studying press, public lectures and, indeed, from the poetry in Welsh. One is struck by his know- platform of the National Eisteddfod itself, ledge, even in the early 1940s, of the work urging them to be true to their traditions, on their guard in defence of their culture: of, for example, Ellis Wynne, Gwili, and 11 Williams-Parry, as well as his knowledge of "Awake, awake; put on your strength". the Bible in Welsh. One notices, too, that the Aware of the central role which the poet central themes of Thomas's writing are once had in Welsh society, giving voice to its already being sounded: his deep love of the essential values and aspirations, R. S. Welsh countryside, a place where one may Thomas has always perceived the poet's be imaginatively alive and spiritually whole; function to be an essentially public one; in his awareness at the same time of the vulner- other words, as he has argued on a number ability of this way of life, the need for Wales of occasions, he sees his two callings, as to resist the deadening effects of material- priest and poet, to be inextricably linked. ism, industrialism and militarism, which he The poet, like the priest, should give moral identifies from the outset, as we have seen, and spiritual leadership; it is a far more with the influence of England. The intense idealistic notion of the poet's role and his idealism and patriotism are already there in influence than has been the usual case in post-War English poetry. ("Poetry makes the young man in his early thirties. One 12 notices, too, the rather curious chronolog- nothing happen", wrote W. H. Auden.) ical pattern of Thomas's Welsh writing. As Ned Thomas and Tony Conran in part- After these early pieces in Welsh, most of his icular have pointed out, R. S. Thomas's prose in the 1950s and 1960s is in English, view of the poet's social role is rooted in the idealism of the Romantic poets, to whom he critical essays, reviews, and introductions to 13 his own selections of English poets, includ- frequently alludes in his essays. In the ing Herbert, Wordsworth and Edward interview which he gave to John Ormond in Thomas. This is also the period, of course, 1972 he emphasizes the fact that the word in which R. S. Thomas was establishing "imagination" has for him the meaning himself as a major poet in English. With the which Coleridge gave to it: "The highest 8 "On the Screen of Eternity" means known to the human psyche of power of Raftery in Ireland and Twm o'r getting into contact with the ultimate reality Nant in Wales to attack the unprincipled . . . The ultimate reality is what we call and mean in the past. But in the 1940s, God".H The poet, therefore, the person of among contemporary writers he sees the particular imaginative power and creative Scottish poet, Hugh MacDiarmid, as prov- gifts, is possessed of special spiritual insight iding a model of what, for Thomas, the poet and as such is equipped to be, as Shelley saw should be: a figure of lonely integrity, him, society's "unacknowledged legis- speaking out against the uniformity, mater- lator". Thomas refers to Shelley's descript- ialism and bureaucracy of modern life, ion of the poet in his essay' 'Some Contemp- which stifle the imaginative and spiritual orary Scottish Writing" and goes on to freedom of the individual. While Thomas, argue that only by expressing the highest like MacDiarmid, sees these destructive ideals and aspirations in poetry is it possible influences as having their origins in English to "at long last change the people and lead commercialism and English government, them to their essential dignity". This ideal- both writers reserve their fiercest scorn for istic vision of the poet as spiritual guide, those of their own people who fail to see the "winnowing and purifying ... the people", dangers, whose eyes are fixed on material is especially strong in R. S. Thomas's early advancement. In the 1980s Thomas sees the writing. The poet should be a healer, rigor- threat to be all the greater and the necessity ously purging the spiritual sickness of the for the Welsh writer to sound a warning to age: his society to be, consequently even more urgent. In "If I knew the language ...", Consider, you, Whose rough hands manipulate for example, he wishes his Welsh were as The fine bones of a sick culture, powerful and as flexible as that of Ellis What areas of that infirm body Wynne, author of Gweledigaetheu y Bardd Depend solely on a poet's cure. Cwsc: ("The Cure", Poetry for Supper, 1958) I would use it to reveal the hypocrisy, the It is a stance Thomas himself has taken from idleness and the servility of the nation today, the beginning, in his prose as well as in his and scourge them until my readers would blush from top to toe, and take a solemn oath poetry, urging, warning: to regain through discipline and self-sacrifice Degeneration is to be seen in every part of our the integrity and dignity which belonged to national life. As long as there are food and their ancestors. drink, greyhounds and cinemas, the majority The other side of the poet's role, of of our people don't care what government is in power. The churches and the chapels will be course, is to raise the eyes of the people to a empty soon because of [these attitudes], and higher ideal, to make them aware that even the fine arts are almost dead already. the things of their ordinary, everyday lives have significance. The task of the poet, In the essay quoted here, "Money and Thomas told Bedwyr Lewis Jones in an 15 Position" ["ArianaSwydd", 1946], R. S. interview in 1969, is Thomas compares the situation in Wales with that in Ireland, where he feels material- to show the true glory of life. I don't believe in ism has all but destroyed the idealism and poets who over-analyse and belittle man. The role of the poet is to elevate man also, and life, optimism which gave birth to her independ- 16 and the earth. ence. The comparison of Wales with her Celtic neighbours is a recurring one in his He goes on to say that however dirty and early writing. (We learn from Neb that he humble the farm-worker may seem in his visited Scotland and Ireland in the 1930s, little field, "yet the sun shines on his field and a number of his early poems were pub- suddenly and without warning and there's lished first in Dublin.) He looks back to the some glory there too". As so often in R. S. "On the Screen of Eternity" 9 Thomas's work, the labourer on the Welsh Occasions hill is an emblem which has more universal on which a clean air entered our nostrils significance: whoever the individual is, off swept seas were instances however prosaic his or her life may seem, it we sought to recapture. can be transformed if seen in the light of its (' 'That Place", Laboratories of the Spirit, 1975) spiritual reality. ("If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to Only through being alert and honest and brave will we succeed in doing our duty and man as it is, infinite", wrote Blake, another deliver a clean Wales [Cymru Ian] to the Romantic poet to whom Thomas refers on future. several occasions in his essays.) By the ex- ("Around Us" ["O'n Cwmpas", 1977])17 pression of his vision in his poetry, the poet, Thomas argues, can begin to bring about a It is a nexus of ideas which has its origins, change of awareness, can re-vitalize the evidently, in Thomas's own temperament. imagination of his readers, bringing them to We notice, for example, in "Y Llwybrau a fuller awareness of their spiritual reality Gynt" his fond recollection of the close of and, ultimately, of God: "The nearest we summer days in the sun and sea air of the approach to God ... is as creative beings", countryside around Holyhead: "... a glass he says in his Introduction to The Penguin of cold water before going to bed tasted Book of Religious Verse, 1963. The harsher marvellous, and the white sheets were tones with which we are familiar in R. S. smooth and refreshing". His autobiograph- Thomas's writing are, manifestly, an ical writing—"Y Llwybrau Gynt", Neb, expression of his disappointment at "Influences" ["Dylanwadau", 1986]18 — society's falling short, and a measure of his makes clear how potent an influence on the idealism: growing poet were those boyhood days in the countryside of Anglesey; in Neb espec- I want to see the splendour of people and ially he emphasises the sense of longing for things, and their shadows which appear the landscape of his youth which he felt as greater than they because of the light which his career took him elsewhere, "a longing throws their shadows on the screen of which would be an influence on him eternity. throughout the years which followed" ("If I knew the language . . .") {Neb, p. 29), and we notice, too, how he is able to identify with "the anguish and the The state of being which Thomas holds up yearning" for his home in Anglesey felt by as a condition towards which men should the exiled Goronwy Owen.19 aspire is frequently expressed in terms of AsR. S.Thomas stood in the 1930s on the cleanness, simplicity, plainness and clarity, "flat uninteresting land" around Maelor in contrast to the grey, impersonal complex- Saesneg, gazing at the mountains away to ity of our modern world: the west, the longing he felt "to get back to the real Wales of my imagination" was, in . . . earth other words, intimately connected to his That is strong here and clean longing for the simple, spontaneous pleas- And plain in its meaning. ure, the sense of imaginative freedom and ("Those Others", Tares, 1961) vitality which he associated with the countryside around Holyhead, now seem- What God was there made himself felt, ingly lost forever. When, still in the 1930s, his Not listened to, in clean colours, ... I walked on, reading of Yeats and "Fiona Macleod" (the Simple and poor . . . pen-name of William Sharp, 1855-1905) ("The Moor", Pieta, 1966) suggested to him that among the peasantry of Galway and the Western Isles of Scotland it was still possible to find "exactly the life 10 "On the Screen of Eternity" he would like to live among the peat and the may gain intimations of the eternal, has heather and the shores of the west" (Neb, p. continued, that place "we ... would spend/ 33), Thomas journeyed to those distant the rest of our lives looking for" ("That areas. But although the sound of the country Place", Laboratories of the Spirit).21 It is a people's Gaelic "and the smell of peat in his country place, clean and bright, usually with nostrils raised his spirits and filled his heart trees, a place where the silence is broken with new hope" (Neb, p. 36), he found that only by the song of birds and the sound of the rural way of life described by Yeats and clear-running streams: MacLeod had almost completely disap- A bird chimes peared. The way of life he was searching for from a green tree was, in Thomas's view, once to be found in the hour that is no hour Wales itself, in the high summer pasture, the you know. life of the hafod, a life he sees as having been ("Arrival", Later Poems, 1983) free and clean and imaginatively rich: Such scenes, such moments at the "inter- There is Eden's garden, its gate open, fresh as 22 it has always been, unsmudged by the world. section of the timeless/With time", run The larks sing high in the sky. No footprints like an elusive thread through Thomas's have bruised the dew... This is the world they writing: went up into on May Day with their flocks fromyrhendre, the winter house, toyr hafod, For one hour the shieling. They spent long days here, I have known Eden, the still place swapping englynion over the peat cutting. We hunger for. ("Again", No? That He Brought Flowers, 1968) Even as he evokes this romantic vision in "The Mountains" (1968), one is again For one brief hour the summer came perhaps aware of the depth of personal To the tree's branches and we heard In the green shade Rhiannon's birds association for a writer whose boyhood was Singing tirelessly as the streams spent within sight of Snowdonia: ".. .to live That pluck glad tunes from the grey stones near mountains is to be in touch with Eden, Of Powys of the broken hills. with lost childhood" ("The Mountains"). ("The Tree", An Acre of Land, 1952) But the life of the hafod, too, has long gone, swept away by more modern patterns of This last example evokes the brief period of agricultural life; in the hills of Montgomery- communal harmony and freedom achieved shire he finds only emptiness and the ruins by Owain Glyndwr, inspired we notice by of the hafotai: the songs of his poet; for the state of being The wind is licking their bones. The old indicated by this recurring set of images is people died, and the world drew their children one which R. S. Thomas repeatedly assoc- closer to itself, leaving the area—desolate [yn iates specifically with Wales and with the anghyfannedd]. Yes, the word hurts the tranquillity of the Welsh countryside. The mind. When I am there, I hear the curlew connection is made most explicitly, of mourning the people who have passed away, course, in "Abercuawg", the remarkable and I dream of the days that were, the days of lecture which R. S. Thomas gave at the Calan Mai and the hafoty; days when the National Eisteddfod in 1976: "Wherever Welsh went to the high pastures to live for a Abercuawg may be, it is a place of trees and season at least "At the bright hem of God, / fields and flowers and bright unpolluted In the heather, in the heather''. 20 streams, where the cuckoos continue to ("Maldwyn", 1951) sing". It is essentially a vision of a transfig- But in R. S. Thomas's writing, the search ured Wales, in which it would be possible to for a place where people may attain their live a life of calm simplicity and spiritual essential freedom and dignity, where they awareness, a place for which, Thomas says, "On the Screen of Eternity" 11 he is "ready to make sacrifices, maybe even having to provide a signpost for others. As to die". we have seen, early in his career Thomas But even as the social, and indeed political, found a model of the stance the writer implications of the recurring motif, the should take in the work of Hugh Mac- elusive place, receive their fullest express- Diarmid, admiring his determined resis- ion, it is made clear that the place is not a tance to "the all-pervading twentieth- geographical location but a spiritual ideal. century rationalism that goes hand in hand The true value is in the aspiration towards with western democracy and industrial dev- the ideal; Abercuawg will never be reached, elopment" ("Some Contemporary Scottish but through striving to see it, through longing Writing"). But in Wales, in the writing of for it, through refusing to accept that it Saunders Lewis, Thomas found a figure belongs to the past and has fallen into whose stance was in many ways similar and oblivion; through refusing to accept some- even more sympathetic. Points of compar- thing second-hand in its place [man] will ison between the writing of R. S. Thomas succeed in preserving it as an eternal possibil- and that of Saunders Lewis have been men- ity. tioned by several critics,23 but the relation- ship of the two writers' work has still to be It is an ideal of continual imaginative aspir- fully explored. One does, however, note that ation, a refusal of the blunted responses and in Neb Thomas tells of visiting Saunders imaginative inertia of a commercial age— Lewis in about 1943. He had been so stirred "No, this is not it". It is by means of the by an essay which Saunders Lewis had pub- power of the imagination—"The highest lished in YFaner that he went, without invi- means known to the human psyche of tation, to visit the author at Llanfarian: getting into contact with the ultimate reality"—that the individual searches [R. S. Thomas] was received kindly and began "within time, for something which is above to talk in English about his ideals and his time, and yet, which is ever on the verge of plans, but before long he was encouraged by being". The search for Abercuawg, in other Saunders to go on in his clumsy Welsh. words, is a search for spiritual awareness, (Neb, p. 45) for intimations of the eternal, of God: This was a potent force with which to "May it not be that alongside us, made in- come into contact for a young writer just visible by the thinnest of veils, is the heaven beginning to find his voice, and a young man we seek?" ("Where do we go from here?" setting out on his search for the "real 1974). The search is a constant striving to Wales". Thomas does not mention reading keep clean ' 'the doors of perception''. It is a more of Saunders Lewis's work, but it seems struggle which recalls those images of lonely more than likely that he did (we remember aspiration in "The Mountains": that Canlyn Arthur had been published in There is the huge tug of gravity, the desire of 1938) and he refers to Saunders Lewis the bone for the ground, with the dogged admiringly in "Some Contemporary Scot- spirit hauling the flesh upward. Rare flowers tish Writing" as a writer who had set aside tremble, waver, just out of reach. his own career as a poet in order to dedicate himself to the nationalist cause in Wales. In It is an image of the individual's struggle to Saunders Lewis's writing Thomas would realize himself/herself fully, in the face of have found many attitudes towards which all those forces in modern life which seek to he would have been sympathetic in the 1930s deny that individuality. and 1940s, to j udge from the opinions which The search for Abercuawg is above all for he himself expresses in his early essays. He R. S. Thomas an image of the lonely struggle would have found, as in MacDiarmid, an of the writer to keep his/her own creative antipathy to the (English) centralized channels open, with the added burden of democratic state whose social and economic 12 "On the Screen of Eternity" systems Saunders Lewis saw as taking away ized system of government run by (and in the the independence of the individual: "It is interests of) international capitalism was not the job of the government of a country expressed in a number of books published to create a complete system and an economic just before the First World War, notably machinery for the people of the country to Chesterton's What's Wrong with the World accept and conform to".24 In Saunders (1910) and Bettoc's The Servile State (1912). Lewis, too, he would have found a vision of What was wrong with the world, they a society based not on the impersonal city, argued, was that capitalist wealth had the creation of capitalism and industrialism, become concentrated in the hands of a small but on small, mainly rural, communities, group of plutocrats who controlled not only communities living and working in the the economic structure of Britain but also Welsh countryside—and speaking Welsh. the Parliamentary parties and, in order to The language not only provided a living link further th^'r own ends, Britain's foreign with the traditions of the past but was fund- policies. Moreover, the plutocratic state was amental to the maintenance of Welsh becoming as mechanized and as indifferent identity and unity in the face of those forces to the individual as the vast factories which which sought to deny it:' 'To create a Welsh- financed it. Chesterton and Belloc essentially speaking Wales [Cymru uniaith] is the surest anticipated E. F. Schumacher and his view way to build up a country in which the op- that "small is beautiful". They advocated pression of international capitalism cannot the break-up of the centralized state and a live".25 As we have seen, not only has R. S. reversion to smaller, independent economic Thomas from the beginning associated all units, with industry existing in small, pre- that he considers most valuable in life with a dominantly rural communities, a vision vision of rural communities living a life which formed the basis of the "Distributist" which is simple but imaginatively alive, but movement in which Chesterton and Belloc that the survival of the "real Wales" is in- were involved in the 1920s and 1930s.28 separable from the survival of the Welsh Whether R. S. Thomas had any knowledge language is a view which he holds even more of the work of these writers is uncertain, passionately today than in the 1940s: though he would have found many of their ideas to his taste. It is worth noting that I do not see any other way towards unity in Belloc's vision of a "Peasant State", emph- Wales but through the Welsh language ... If asizing political freedom, an attachment to a anyone believes he can experience the Welsh- locality or region, and a concern with the nessof Wales without the language, he's fool- produce of the land, was based on an ideal- ing himself. Every mountain and stream, ised vision of French peasant life; he saw the every farm and little lane announces to the life of the rural community as preserving a world that landscape is not mere landscape in respect for tradition, a sense of rootedness Wales. 26 and a strong religious sense, all of which was ("Unity" ["Undod", 1985]) in sharp contrast to the rootlessness and materialism of modern industrial society. By way of a brief aside, we might note that There is something, too, of the same the vision of a society in which wealth is not nostalgia for a pre-industrial past of which held by a few capitalists or controlled by R. S. Thomas has been accused. At the heart government but by a large number of small of this social vision is the figure of the groups, communities, or individuals, a peasant, sturdy and independent. society in which the individual can work his/her own land, live his/her own life, free R. S. Thomas's ideal of rural community of the centralized state, Saunders Lewis —derived from Wordsworth, from Yeats found in, among other places, the "distri- and MacLeod, and perhaps from these other butism" of Hilaire Belloc and G. K. sources—met reality at Manafon in the Chesterton.27 Their criticism of a central- 1940s and his early poetry is, manifestly, an "On the Screen of Eternity" 13 effort to wrestle with the discrepancy, as It was a sad experience to wander Mynydd well as with his own sense of his incapacity to Mawr in the dawn, and walk the lanes and minister to the community as its priest. It is a hollows, without seeing anything. It was like a community which, even as Thomas museum. I said to everyone: "I remember watches, is gradually being invaded by the how it was once, the sky and the lanes full". It values of the modern commercial world. is a symbol of Pen Llyn without the Welsh Iago Prytherch, having been absent from language, the deathliness which would be Thomas's poetry for some years, is finally there. laid to rest in "Gone?" {Frequencies, 1978); Moreover, these images of desolation which by now the countryside is a place of tractors are associated with Wales are linked in a and televisions, the trees replaced by "a very direct way in Thomas's mind with forest of aerials". The Wales Thomas images of a more universal desolation. If it is surveys, far from being that tranquil place man's desire to better himself in material of birdsong, trees and streams, is increasing- things, in the goods of the modern world, ly seen to be in actuality a spiritual and which is ultimately responsible for destroy- imaginative waste land,29 whose outer form ing the life of the hafotai, "leaving the area is —desolate", Thomas now sees the same values, on a national and international level, street after street of modern characterless as threatening the future of the whole earth: houses, each one with its garage and its tele- "Man's cupidity, to use a medieval term, vision aerial; a place from which the trees and has placed in his hands the ability to make the birds and the flowers have fled before the the world desolate" ("A Nuclear Christ- yearly extension of concrete and tarmac- mas" ["Nadolig Niwcliar", 1983]).30 The adam; where people do the same kind of soul- threat of nuclear warfare, and especially the less, monotonous work to support more and more of their kind. absurd claims of some political leaders that ("Abercuawg") it is possible to fight a nuclear war and win, has caused Thomas, whose pacifism was It is the place of Blake's "dark Satanic being sounded loud and clear in the 1940s, to mills'', where' 'the doors of perception" are speak out, not only in his writing but on clogged and the life of the spirit cannot public platforms, on behalf of the campaign survive: against nuclear weapons. They represent the ultimate threat of the age of the machine, . . . the dust spreads the complete negation of Abercuawg: "The Its carpet. Over the creeds earth smoked, no birds sang" ("Once", And masterpieces our wheels go. H'm). ("No Answer", H'm, 1972) As people far beyond the borders of And the language is lost, too: Wales have awoken to the threat to the earth's survival from nuclear weapons, In the drab streets from industrial pollution and from over- That never knew The cold stream's sibilants exploitation of natural resources, the Our tongues are coated with themes R. S. Thomas has been sounding for A dustier speech. many years in a specifically Welsh context ("Expatriates". Poetry for Supper, 1958) have taken on even more clearly a more uni- versal significance.31 But while others are This sense of desolation is poignantly caught also now arguing that "small is beautiful", in "Unity" when Thomas speaks of one the struggle, both in Wales and beyond, has year when, because of the weather, the become more urgent and his tones have migratory birds—those birds that represent become more bleak, at times even so much in R. S. Thomas's life and in his despairing, especially when he looks at writing—did not come to Aberdaron: Wales itself: "The end of the nation is plain 14 "On the Screen of Eternity" ... Its people don't think like Welsh It was a time when wise men people nor act like Welsh people. There are Were not silent, but stifled only the relics of a nation left on their By vast noise. lips".32 Even after his long pilgrimage back ("Period", H'm) to Welsh-speaking Wales, the sense of being 33 I see the wise man an exile, "an exile in my own land" is still with his mouth open shouting present: a fervent supporter of the Welsh inaudibly on this side of the abyss. language in a Wales in which the language ("Eheu! Fugaces", The Way of It, 1977) struggles for survival, an advocate of the simple life of the countryside in a land At times one is reminded of the Old Testa- echoing with the sound of machinery, a man ment prophets whose words R. S. Thomas concerned with the things of the imagination echoes on several occasions. He continues to and the spirit in a society devoted to quite speak out to the Welsh people from his different values. "A displaced person" western fastness, warning, criticizing, Wynn Thomas called him in a recent televis- urging higher ideals. His geographical ion programme;34 it is a very different journey may have come to its end, but his picture from the earlier idealistic vision of late poetry, with its recurring images of trav- the poet as imaginative leader of his society, elling, of pilgrimage and exploration, shows "winnowing and purifying" the people. A that the spiritual journey goes on, the inner recurring motif in the later poetry has been search for glimpses of the "ultimate one of loneliness, of the poets and men of reality", signs of God's presence. Despite vision as isolated, their words unheard or the dust of the waste land, R. S. Thomas ignored: clearly still holds to his vision of man's spiritual existence, the shadow man casts on Among the forests the screen of eternity: Of metal the one human Man is the dream of a shadow. But when the Sound was the lament of god-given brightness comes The poets for deciduous language. A bright light is among men, and an age that is ("Postscript", H'm) gentle comes to birth.35

NOTES This essay is a revised, English version of Tony 3 "The Welsh Parlour", Listener, 16 January 1958, Brown's Introduction to a forthcoming selection, co- p. 119. edited with Bedwyr Lewis Jones, of R. S. Thomas's 4See "Adar y Plwyfi" ["Birds of the Parishes"], Y Welsh prose. The selection, which will include the Llan, 28 September 1945, p. 5; "Adar y Gaeaf" texts of most of the Welsh material referred to in the ["Birds of the Winter"], YLlan, 28 December 1945, essay, will be published by Christopher Davies. p. 8. 1R. S. Thomas, Neb [Nobody], Caernarfon: Gwasg 5 During the week of the National Eisteddfod at Gwynedd, 1985, p. 85. Dolgellau in 1949 the Union Jack had been flown from 2"Y Llwybrau Gynt" ["The Paths Gone By"] in the tower of the parish church, only to be pulled down R. S. Thomas: Selected Prose, ed. Sandra Anstey, by nationalists. The incident gave rise to a discussion in Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press, 1983, p. 138. Where a the columns of Y Llan as to the relationship between translation of an essay originally published in Welsh the Church and Wales of which the present letter appears in this selection, I have used that text in quot- formed part. ations. Otherwise the translations are my own and the 6 Y Llan, 2 September 1949, p. 5. See also R. S. original Welsh source is given. I am grateful for the Thomas's letters to the same journal on 7 March 1947, assistance and advice of Mrs Megan Tomos of the p. 6, and 3 February 1950, p. 8. U.C.N.W. Translation Unit in matters of translation. 7 YFaner, 11 January 1980, p. 4. In the case of essays originally published in English, ""Gwilym Rees Hughes yn holi R. S. Thomas", unless another source is cited, the text is to be found in Barn, 129 (1973), p. 386. Selected Prose. 'See Ned Thomas's discussion of R. S. Thomas's "On the Screen of Eternity" 15 shift in attitude to the role of the Anglo-Welsh writer. Jenkins, "The Occasional Prose of R. S. Thomas" in Introduction to Selected Prose, pp. 13-15. the same issue, p. 101. 10See "The Creative Writer's Suicide", Selected "Saunders Lewis, "Deg Pwynt Polisi", Canlyn Prose, p. 170, and "Pe medrwn yr iaith . . .". Arthur, Aberystwyth: Gwasg Aberystwyth, 1938, p. "Isaiah, 52:1. R. S. Thomas quotes the verse at the 11. conclusion of the letter cited in footnote 6. 25"Un Iaith i Gymru", Canlyn Arthur, p. 60. 12 W. H. Auden, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats". 26The J. R. Jones Memorial Lecture, University 13 See Ned Thomas's Introduction to Selected Prose College, Swansea, 9 December 1985. and Anthony Conran, The Cost of Strangeness: 27See, for example, Dafydd Glyn Jones's essay on Essays on the English Poets of Wales, Llandysul: Saunders Lewis's political thought in Presenting Gomer, 1982, pp. 220-8. Saunders Lewis, ed. Alun R. Jones and Gwyn 14 John Ormond, "R. S. Thomas: Priest and Poet", Thomas, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1972, p. Poetry Wales, 7, No. 4 (1972), p. 54. 36. 15 YFflam, No. 1 (1946), pp. 29-30. 28 The fullest recent account of Chesterton and ,6Bedwyr Lewis Jones, "R. S. Thomas", Barn, 76 Belloc's political writing and of the Distributist (1969), n. pag. The interview is in the supplement, movement is Jay P. Corrin, G. K. Chesterton and "O'rStiwdio". Hilaire Belloc: The Battle Against Modernity, 17 YFaner, 4 March 1977, p. 9. London: Ohio U.P., 1981. 18 YFaner, 7 November 1986, pp. 12-13. ""Border Blues" (Poetry for Supper, 1958) would "In R. S. Thomas's speech as President of the Day seem at times consciously to echo some of T. S. Eliot's at the National Eisteddfod at Llangefni, 3 August techniques in The Waste Land. 1983. See Y dorian Ddyddiol ('Steddfod '83), 6 '"Barn, 251/2 (Dec. 1983/Jan. 1984), pp. 420-21. August 1983, p. 2, and Llawlyfr Eisteddfod Gened- 31 See R. S. Thomas's comments in "R. S. Thomas laethol Cymru, 1983, pp. 105-7. talks to J. B. Lethbridge", Anglo-Welsh Review, No. 20 Y Llan, 9 March 1951, pp. 7-8. On the verse 74 (1983), p. 42. quoted at the end, see Selected Prose, p. 25. 32 Interview with Rhys Owen, Pais, September 1983, 21 On this motif and its significance, see also Simon p. 9. Barker's review of Selected Prose, Poetry Wales, 20, 33Eisteddfod speech, 1983. See note 19. No. 1 (1984), pp. 72-9. "Bookmark, B.B.C. 2, February 1986. 22T. S. Eliot, "The Dry Salvages". 35Pindar's Eighth Pythian Ode, in a translation by 23See, for example, Dafydd Elis Thomas, "The E. M. Forster. R. S. Thomas paraphrased the ode in Image of Wales in R. S. Thomas's Poetry", Poetry Neb, p. 87. Wales, 1, No. 4 (1972), pp. 63, 65-6, and Randal Charles Lock "To Ravage and Redeem": Maiden Castle and the Violation of Form

Maiden Castle overtly measures itself This is the moment, early in the novel, at against a nineteenth-century antecedent. which the novel's major theme is made The presence of The Mayor of Casterbridge clear: is a person an "innocent" and detach- reminds the reader of the tenets of histor- ed student of history, and of myth, or an icism, that character is destiny, and that implicated participant in history and in books come from authors. Maiden Castle is myth? Powys's extraordinary attempt not to think Dud's attempts to escape history involve those things. his name and his sexuality. He has rejected Hardy's novel provides Powys's with both his names, his parents' surname both a prior literary realisation of Dorchest- "Smith", and his given, baptismal name er, and a set of themes. But for the antitype which we never learn. His acquired first of Henchard's wife-selling, Dud's buying of name, "Dud", was jointly invented by his a wife would be absurd and fantastic. It is mother and himself when he was an infant: the reader rather than Dud who needs and in his babbling efforts to address his father accepts such a justification, for Dud as "Dad", he referred only to himself. It becomes aware of the parallel-inversion was of course his mother who knew that her only on p. 250 (262).' It is hardly necessary husband—Dud's "Dad"—was not in fact to emphasise the significance of Dud's being Dud's father; it was thus the mother who a historical novelist. For one who is diverts the name "Dud" from putative "history-obsessed" the mystery and fascin- father to son. How Dud addressed his ation of life lies in causality, not in typology. mother's husband we are not told. When as Dud acknowledges "the great Wessex an adult Dud learns that Aaron Smith is not author'' in the use of descriptive similes and his father he rejects his surname and takes atmospheric moods, but he does not one that is "entirely his own choice" (6; 18), recognise that one of Hardy's novels is an "No-man". Most fictional characters have active shaper of his own life. His obsession names that have been doubly chosen for with history is presumed by Dud himself to them: a name such as Jane Eyre is both his- be quite detached: "I'll write my books and torically plausible and authorially signif- icant. Many fictional names are more plaus- I'll live in the present!" (23; 35) Yet while he ible than significant; only Stephen Dedalus supposes himself to be a harmless eccentric is all significance and entirely devoid of interested in history, Dud gives another and credibility. Dud No-man has a name that very different impression to others: has been chosen for him neither by his He had been tapping the ground steadily with parents nor by his author but only by him- his great cudgel as he went along, and his self. It is first seen by its future bearer not as awkward figure with its long arms, bony a name but as a phrase: "The phrase had countenance, and close-cropped skull might come upon him, in his sulky reaction against have belonged to some necrophilistic Cerne his parents, as an inspiration of pure misan- Giant, intent on playing the werewolf in a civ- thropy" (6; 18). The name is "misanthrop- ilized graveyard, rather than to an innocent ic" not only because it negates man but antiquarian recluse. (16; 29) because it tells nothing to others, it leaves its "To Ravage and Redeem" 17 bearer free of parentage, outside the human deny his sexuality, and that denial is of story that every name tells. course already implied in his chosen name. In his deed of self-naming, however, Dud Haggling with her master-employer, Old has unwittingly, uncunningly, chosen one of Funky, over Wizzie, Dud insists that "at any the names of Ulysses: rate she's somebody's girl" (31; 43) and Funky retorts, with a notable distortion of In using this name that was no name, he had not been thinking of Odysseus's encounter with the Dud's words: Cyclops, for he was at that time unacquainted with Homer. (6; 18) ' You'be a-said, sir, in me hearing, sir, that she in there were some man's gal! but I tell 'ee sir, In "Cyclops", the twelfth section of . . . she be no man's girl and never will be Ulysses, Joyce makes extraordinary play nothinkelse.' (31-2; 44) with the link between the giant's condition and Odysseus's strategy: the one-eyed giant The very ambiguity of Funky's words is pro- is outwitted by the one-I'd hero. I is the ideal phetic—for although No-man buys her he name, the only name which plays no tricks never possesses her. Wizzie herself will even- on its bearer and reveals nought to others. tually complain that "you're not a man" "No-man", meaning both I and not-I, was (428; 440), and Dud recognizes in this for Odysseus a dazzling gloss on the ideal respect his inferiority to Funky, who had name of "I". But for Dud, coming after, the seduced Wizzie: "Old Funky had done for non-name "No-man" is easily, inevitably [not 'to'] this woman's body what he wasn't translated into ' 'Ulysses"—of all names the man enough to do!" (269; 282) At the begin- least innocent, the most utterly implicated, ning of the novel we learn that "it was Dud's storied and readable. The author is thus misfortune to be rendered nervously exempt from the folly of Dud: a story about incapable of consummating his marriage" sons and fathers cannot be "self-naming", to Mona (8; 20); it would seem to be less of a and this novelist has of course read Homer, misfortune than a strategy by which, as well and Joyce.2 as having no father, Dud will be no father. The self-chosen name has yet another ref- Being sexually what is implied by both erence unknown to Dud at the time of parts of his chosen name, Dud escapes the choosing. Engraved on the tombstone of his sequence of biological necessity. This, wife, who died of pneumonia while nursing somewhat extremely, Dud considers to be unnatural: " 'There's something grotesque her sick parents-in-law, is the Biblical text: . . . about the relation of father and son. "Greater love hath no man than this." (20; It's outside nature.' " (162; 174) The con- 32) Ten years later (for he is as slow-witted dition of Dud's obsession with history is that with his Bible as with his Homer) Dud real- he has no part in it. One might assume that izes for the first time that "this scriptural paternity mediates history and nature, but anonymity it talked about was himself, . . . for Dud paternity is identified entirely with And that this 'greater' love, whatever kind history: of thing it was, was the prerogative of poor Dud!" (20; 32) It is this message from the tombstone that releases Dud from his ten For a moment he struggled desperately to find years' devotion to Mona's memory, and a rational defence for his loathing of the process of generation.'Parthenogenesis is the inspires him to buy his "greater love" in natural thing! That's why the act of love is Wizzie. One of the themes of Maiden Castle monstrous and ridiculous. Lust isn't comic. is the hubris of self-naming: a Smith is a Lust is grave and sacred. And there's nothing Smith, but a No-man is both Ulysses and a but poetry in conception. It's the act of pater- saintly ideal. nity that's so horribly humorous ... An inter- Self-naming provides no escape from ference with the beautiful processes of history. Dud's other strategy of escape is to parthenogenesis.' (162; 174) 18 "To Ravage and Redeem" One aspect of parthenogenesis is, oddly what we are reading is the romance that Dud enough, illegitimate birth. Lust and is writing: conception bring to birth a child who will know no father and have no father's name. ... he thought how, if he were writing a story about himself, he would make All Souls' Day, Adoption is the "natural" alternative to this last autumn, appear like a new birth, the paternity: birth of a middle-aged man over forty into He was ready to adopt Wizzie's child [Lovie] normal human life. (249; 261) tomorrow. He remembered his thoughts about parthenogenesis in connection with his All Souls' Day is the celebration of the total- own birth. He would no more see Urgan's ity of human being, of the non-individua- blood in Lovie than he was able to feel ted. The would-be anonymous and hardly Uryen's blood in himself! (267; 280) virtuous Dud chooses, fittingly, to begin his story on the one day of the year that com- In acknowledging a father whom he does memorates neither a saint nor a name. not feel to be his father, and in adopting a Maiden Castle does indeed begin on All child whose father is known to him, Dud is Souls' Day, as if to suggest that the novelist the beneficiary of his idiosyncratic notion of has relinquished much more than his prero- parthenogenesis; his notion does not, of gative to choose his hero's name. Insofar as course, allow him to suppose that he could this day marks the beginning or' 'birth'' of a make himself the cause of various women man aged over forty, "parthenogenesis" is giving birth as "virgins". For Dud paternity an apt word. The reader must be brought to and the act of love are features of history, wonder whether it is foolish to enquire into and unnatural. To nature belongs "grave the paternal origin of a fictional character. and sacred" lust (presumably manifested in The progress of the book through one solitary acts, whether of masturbation or calendar year involves Dud's finding of his rape), conception and illegitimate birth. father, his eventual acceptance of What Dud objects to is not the facts of "normal" life, and even the possibility of birth, sex and death, but their social and becoming a father. By Uryen Quirm, his cultural ritualization: not birth but baptism, father, and by Wizzie, Dud's attempt at not sex but love, marriage and inheritance of anonymity—no name, no-man—is foiled. names, not (as we see in the graveyard) death Dud has purchased Wizzie precisely for her but burial. These cultural "rites of passage" anonymity and impersonality which would are, in the anthropological use of the phrase, reinforce his own: supposed to link all human beings in all societies. Dud rejects his baptismal name, ... yes, in relation to this girl he was a real No- makes by his celebacy a parody of marriage, man; or rather he was a Man without a Name, and sees the grave-plot meant for him filled encountering, for the first time in his primeval by his father. While rites of passage are wanderings, a Woman without a Name! (90; common to all human societies, their 102) function is, in Jung's term, individuation— by naming, by celebrating each person's Just as the Mona to whose memory Dud was participation in common themes. By his faithful for ten years was not the real woman name, and by the denial of his sexuality, at all but a fetish of his own making—"She Dud resists individuation, resists being a had been a creation of anonymous desire" person. (474; 486)—so the kind of attention that Dud gives to Wizzie is little different from # # # that with which she is all too familiar: About halfway through the novel, and so accustomed had she grown in the Circus to shortly after Dud has discovered the identity these anonymous recognitions of the desirab- of his father, there is an obvious hint that ility of her person . . . (334; 345) "To Ravage and Redeem" 19 The purchase, that at first seems to fit the To the reader of fiction, however, Uryen stereotype of the redeemed prostitute, leads sounds a deal more authentic than Dud No- only to a perpetuation of Wizzie's enslaved man. Uryen's response to Dud, in justif- and objectified status. In Dud's company ication of his chosen name, is devastating: Wizzie misses the personal recognition that she had received from her horse, to whom Then he remarked in a low and perfectly calm voice: 'It was your mother's favourite name. alone she could relate as to a human being. We meant it to be .your name!' (219; 231) Dud had of course been determined not to find the identity of his father, "for the The act of paternity involves the privilege of whole business of discovering 'a local habit- naming one's child. This is the moment in ation and a name' for his solitary spirit went which Enoch announces that he is Dud's against the grain of his life-illusion." (231; father. What Dud has called parthenogen- 243) There are here parallels to Wolf Solent, esis precludes the naming of the son by the but the differences are telling. Wolf persists father: in carnivalesque consequence of in his' 'mythology'' at the expense of reality, which the father has taken the name which and his' 'mythology'' consists in telling stor- belongs to the son—Uryen—and the son has ies about himself. Dud similarly denies the taken the name of the father—Dad/Dud. reality of other people, but his life-illusion is Imaginatively the discovery of the father that he is non-existent—if not non-existent is likely to be a disaster, for it usually puts to in the body, then non-existent as an indiv- an end the bastard's privilege of fantasizing idual person. And this life-illusion is main- about his origins: tained by the absence of stories, until Dud finds his father and imagines himself to be He began telling himself a childish story writing his novel. About Maiden Castle the about his father being some great Welsh common critical complaint is that there is no nobleman, who claimed to be descended from story. It would be more precise to say that Sir Pellenore. (116; 129) there are stories at cross-purposes: Wizzie In Enoch Quirm Dud finds a father whose was chosen by Dud for her impersonality, surname, we are told, is pure Dorset; for her part in the story of anonymous happily there is a complication: Enoch is ''Man'' and anonymous ' 'Woman''. As she himself an adopted foundling, and is there- is quick to realize, she can have no part in the fore unhindered in his own fantasies of story in which Dud son of Enoch Quirm is an Welsh descent (229-30; 241-42). A bastard individual character. and his bastard son both, unknown to each As he enters a story, even history, by other, share a congruent fantasy of Welsh finding a father, so Dud sheds his anon- origin. (Might Powys be alluding to Bloom's ymity and impersonality to become a char- and Stephen's "twin dream" of Turkish red acter with a name. Out of his enthusiasm for slippers?) Father and son met and recog- Welsh mythology Enoch Quirm has chosen, nized, the fantasies of origin are not negated like his son, a name for himself: Uryen. Dud but combined and strengthened. objects to his father's deed of self-naming, Enoch Quirm believes himself to be the and to the name chosen: reincarnation (another form of partheno- genesis) of Uryen who signifies, to Enoch, 'What was it that made you change your the power of the ancient pre-Celtic gods ' 'to name from Enoch to Uryen? Enoch's a good Biblical name; and I've often heard it down break the bonds of life's natural law" (236; here... I don't think Uryen's nearly as honest 248), "to reach the life behind life" (237; a name as Enoch. There's something tricky 249);' 'this 'Uryen' in me... is the old magic and shifty, something fanciful and affected of the mind, when, driven to bay by the dogs about Uryen to me! It's like the name of a of reality, it turns upon the mathematical person in a book. It doesn't sound authen- law of life and tears it to bits!" (240; 252) tic.'(218-19; 231) Uryen's lecture on the meaning of his name 20 "To Ravage amd Redeem" (which ought to be Dud's) is given to Dud No-man" is a near-palindrome, and we while father and son are sitting on the might find a palindrome reflexively sterile; ramparts of Maiden Castle, currently under read aright, Mona-No-man can yield M— excavation: onan—oman; and, so neatly, onan is an 'You think it's madness to talk of the old anagram of anon. The Cerne Giant has both gods of Mai-Dun? You think I ought to be a phallus and a cudgel; Dud's cudgel rep- interested in their excavations, and their resents his manhood, for without it even No- proofs that human beings lived in this place man is less than a man: like hyenas in holes among bones. I tell you, lad, the truth of life's in the imagination, not 'How babyish he looks without his stick!' in ashes and urns! I tell you we, I and others Wizzie thought. 'With it he looks like a selfish old man; without it like a selfish child!' (366; like me, are the gods of Mai-Dun ... as I talk 4 to you now I feel the power rushing through 386) me. You may well clutch at the grass! This The cudgel makes the difference between bank, and that one opposite us, that seem so solid . . . They're mists and mirages and selfish impotence and a selfish potency. vapours! . . . Don't you feel this whole great Uryen's lecture to Dud is interrupted by fortress ready to shake, shiver, melt, dissolve? the instrusion on the ramparts of some Don't you feel that you and I are behind it, vulgar sightseers, one of whom calls out to making it what it is by the power of our Dud: minds?' (238; 250) 'Killed anything with that stick yet?' one of Dud is disdainfully sceptical of all that the boys shouted; and their giggling broke into a loud guffaw. (239; 251) Uryen says; yet Uryen's principle of mani- festing his divine power is very similar to Dud is not at all surprised or agitated at this, Dud's principle for preserving his life- for he had been anticipating such remarks: illusion: It had been a wonder to him, all these months, 'Don't you see what force there is in sterile that the people he passed in his walks love? Why, my dear boy, it's the strongest refrained from jeering at this absurd stick. force there is! Rampant desire unfulfilled— (238; 250) why, there's nothing it can't do! Stir up sex till it would put out the sun and then keep it Such a large stick is indeed absurd if it is not sterile! That's the trick. That's the grand trick used for large deeds; likewise, our sense of of all spiritual life.' (240; 252) the absurd in the presence of the Cerne Giant is dependent on the absence of a rep- To Uryen's spectacularly challenging imper- resented female. Soon after the jeer the ative Dud has been oddly, almost unknow- cudgel's absurdity suggests to Dud a link ingly, obedient. Dud's sterility has been with medieval chivalry and its twin virtues of maintained all the while that his cudgel has strength and chastity: elicited comparison with that of the Cerne Giant, of all phallic representations the one 'It's doubtful,' he thought, 'whether any of that with most magnificent plausibility the men of old time, except perhaps a few might be able to "put out the sun". mediaeval knights, would sit as quiet as I'm Readers often think of Dud as impotent. sitting here now, with this Cerne Giant stick There is little if any evidence of this in the on my lap, listening to the 'Horse-Head' text, and the erroneous deduction obscures putting me in my place!' (255; 268; Jenny Dearth) the crucial difference between impotence and sterility. In No-man's name we can find Before the boys had been the first in Dor- covert hints of sterile potency: his wife's chester to jeer and guffaw, Wizzie had name, Mona, suggests a marriage of one appreciated the uselessness of the stick; with the same, the figment being perhaps his when Dud had placed it on her bed she had own creation, his own reflection;3 "Mona caused it to fall off, "with an impatient "To Ravage and Redeem" 21 movement of her knees" (180; 192). A mere symbol of Dud's personality: of Dud's sixty pages later, but immediately after the achievement of personality the stick is the guffaw, while Dud is still on the ramparts, sign. he reconstructs that scene with Wizzie: When Dud digs his stick into the earth a connection is made, belatedly, between ... the grotesque incident of Wizzie's kicking Dud's problems and the novel's public his stick under their bed rushed into his mind. 'She kicked it with her bare foot,' he said to event: the stick in the earth is an emblem of himself with the bitterness of one who has excavation as well as penetration. received an irremediable wrong . . . this del- * * * iberate kicking of his stick assumed, as it returned to his mind, the proportions of an In the male characters we find a direct unpardonable crime. (245; 257) relationship between the degree of subjectivity and the importance of the Comparison of the two passages shows how meaning of Maiden Castle. Meaning is drastically and melodramatically Dud has dependent on the personal. But the personal altered the facts. The falling of the stick to is not humanly universal. Of the thoughts of the floor, caused by "an impatient move- the female characters, with the exception of ment of her knees" under the bedclothes, is Wizzie, we know very little, and their harmless. The stick had then rolled under personalities are vague. In his other novels the bed; after recovering it, awkwardly and Powys is accomplished at depicting con- gracelessly, Dud assumes, silently and trasting female types (Gerda and Christie, without evidence or argument, "that it must Mary Crow and Nell Zoyland); the reader's have been a deliberate and vicious kick from frustration at the weak characterization of one of Wizzie's bare feet that had propelled Nance, Jenny and Thuella is thus likely to be this inanimate companion of his life out of intentional. These women are presented not his reach." (180-81; 192-93) Given what it in themselves, or as they are to themselves, stands for, the stick being deliberately but in and through their subservience to the kicked by a bare foot might well appear an male characters. unpardonable crime. Like Wolf Solent, Dud Wizzie is the only female whose silent must invent his enemies and their offences. thoughts are continuously disclosed to the On the one hand, through the stick Dud reader: she is the only female to be "ade- identifies himself with the Cerne Giant; on quately" or "normally" characterized. the other hand, through Wizzie's supposed Wizzie's thoughts about men have at least treatment of the stick Dud creates his own as much validity as the reader's; faced with vulnerability, his own susceptibility to out- the tiresomeness of all the male characters— rage. from the selfishly absorbed to the imper- That' 'inanimate companion'' of a stick is sonally abstract—Wizzie becomes the active, or activated, only twice in the novel, reader's accomplice in resentment and irrit- at the beginning and at the end. On the way ation. She represents the distinctively to the cemetery Dud "broke some thin cat- female apprehension of the elemental, the ice, that was already melting in the sun, with unquestioning acceptance of things as they the end of his great stick," (17; 29) and in the are, which is, throughout Powys's novels, book's penultimate sentence, "he dug his the envy of men. Wizzie is entirely conscious stick into the earth.'' (484; 496) The progres- of Dud's selfishly imaginative use of her, as sion, from the tentative breaking of the impersonal, timeless "Woman". She already melting membrance of ice, to the complains to Funky about Dud "droning on vigour of the final gesture, provides a about how . . . the history women worship- measure of Dud's development, even of his ped bulls and how he and me were sweet- achievement. The stick survives the treat- hearts before history began" (282; 295) and ment of Wizzie and strangers, to become the after visiting the excavations she knows that 22 "To Ravage and Redeem" Dud's "happiness just now was partly refinement the paradox of Wolf Solent has caused by that stone woman's head, with been not resolved but inverted. The earlier which he'd no doubt fallen in love simply novel is troubled in its structural core by the because she'd been buried for a thousand objection that, if a life-illusion is necessary years ..." (365; 376-77) to human existence, Wolf cannot have his In his obsession with Mona's ghost and in life-illusion destroyed and yet live. Dud's the presence of Wizzie Dud knows only life-illusion is that he is a nobody; the novel imaginative exploitation. But when he finds ends when its protagonist accepts that, in his father and then distances himself from spite of all, he has been not a historical Uryen, Dud also removes himself from the novelist looking on, but the protagonist. egocentric and subjective regard of others Dud might even be seen as the type of the which father and son had shared. Realising narrator of Wolf Solent. That narrator is the illusoriness of their atavistic fantasies hardly known to the reader but he is the Wizzie says, to herself, "I wouldn't be a occasion of a major crux: How can the nar- man for anything." (327; 338) At the rator assert, as if from above, the universal- moment at which Uryen approaches Wizzie ity of the life-illusion without excluding Dud develops an affinity with Wizzie which himself from the class of those subject to it? is almost an apprehension of what it is to be The narrator of Wolf Solent must assume a woman: that he is not human, and readers can assume that that is his life-illusion. The nar- But if the humorous feeling that might be rator of Maiden Castle is also elusive. In called a recognition of the eternal limitations giving equal weight and sympathy to each of Homo Sapiens was on her side over Mr. opinion he or she is, like the narrator of A Wye and D., it was on No-Man's side when Glastonbury Romance, part of a poly- Uryen came up to where she stood and began phony. Maiden Castle's narrator goes to talk to her. further even than that polyphony in giving 'I didn't dress like this for you,' she kept greater recognition to the value of silence, saying to herself . . . (327; 338) the absence of any voice or opinion. The masculine tendency to meaning and struct- And this introduces the passage in which ure, and to artistic form, is subverted by Uryen tries to fashion a relationship bet- Powys's and his narrator's awareness that a ween Wizzie and Thuella, a sterile relation- male author or narrator is subject, like Dud, ship that will "put out the sun". The to the (unspoken) rebukes of Wizzie. moment at which Wizzie turns for love to a Among his contemporaries Powys admired woman is the moment at which Dud realizes few novelists, and no woman writer, as is No-man not only in name, not only that he much as Dorothy Richardson. To emulate sexually, but in the very condition of being, Richardson would be to succumb, as author in his self-consciousness. The rest of the and narrator, to the illusion of being book sees the friendship between Wizzie and without gender. No-man can thus be seen to Thuella grow in no accord whatever with constitute Powys's speculation on his own Uryen's intentions; when Wizzie and ability to represent with almost equal Thuella take themselves of f to America Dud conviction and conficence both male and is forced to accept the untenability, as name, female characters. Somewhat analogously as gender and as self-consciousness, of being to Dud's withholding, Powys refrains from "No-man". creating female characters except through It is, as we have seen, Dud's life-illusion the (inadquate) mediation of male percept- that he is "new-born" at the beginning of ion. Rather than attempt to follow Dorothy the book. The No-man, born of a virgin at Richardson in Miriam's unstructured flow middle-age, sheds the illusion of being a mir- of absorbed impressions Powys accepts that aculous nobody and accepts the reality of his novel will have structure just as, regard- being a natural anybody. In a sophisticated "To Ravage and Redeem" 23 less of intention, No-man will be protagon- with detachment. Because he will not make ist. But in order that the structure may be the sacrifice that lies beyond cuddling, seen to be an illusion, a projection of Wizzie will not stay with Dud; his is an meaning and peculiarly male, Maiden "objective" virtue that has nothing to do Castle is without some vital elements, and with persons. contains built-in flaws. Structure is life- In this novel there will be no resolution in illusion, and the structure of Maiden Castle which Dud performs the sacrifice by which incorporates its own undoing. another person is acknowledged. The * * * gesture of digging his stick into the earth indicates such a possibility after the book's Dostoevsky was willing to sacrifice his end. Within the novel the sacrifices are made novel as a work of art for the sake of a higher by the other male characters, Uryen, Claud- value. Sacrifice is central in Maiden Castle ius and Teucer. Uryen is driven to disclose for it is through sacrifice that a person, his subjective beliefs and opinions to the whether as celebrant or victim, can move public, through journalistic reports on the from innocence and detachment to partici- excavation. In consequence he must give up pation and implication in myth and history. either his life or his beliefs: "I was strong in That the novel itself may not be immune, a my faith. But when I wrote of it for the vehicle for the objective understanding of world the virtue went out of me." (456; 469) life and reality and sacrifice, it too must be Claudius objectifies himself, for the sake of sacrificed, its form violated. Dud's own the future, to such an extent that sacrifice historical romance about Dorchester, shad- has ceased to be a matter of will or intention: owing the one we are reading, treats of the his "desire was to get rid of desire, to life of Mary Channing, publicly executed, become, in fact, an automaton of self-sacri- for murder, in Maumbury Rings, once a fice, and he had gone further than many Roman amphitheatre and place of sacrifice. saints in this direction." (112; 124) Part of Yet Dud's sterility, his illusion of non-being, this "automatic sacrifice" involves living is a refusal of sacrifice. In an important utter- with Teucer's daughter Jenny in complete ance, by which Wizzie actually expresses to chastity or, as the "Cast of Characters" Dud her thoughts about him, this contra- puts it, in "Platonic friendship". When diction is pointed out: Claudius is on his death-bed Jenny, because 'I can't understand how anyone like you, of a minor quarrel, refuses to help him, for who's writing books about people'—Wizzie that would be "putting weakness before had no idea she was going to blurt this out, but principle". (385; 397) Claudius is too self- the thought seemed to have got so heavy in her less, too objective to complain. mind that it slipped out and fell of its own accord, like a ripe pear—'can hate everyone It is the Platonist, Teucer, who under- like you do, D.!' (346-47; 358) stands the value of weakness, who senses its priority over principle, when he protests that Playing with the obvious vicariousness of his daughter is an "unnatural old maid . . . the fictional experience, we can resolve the You're only half a woman .. . if you'd gone apparent contradiction: Dud chooses a sac- to bed with the man, Jenny, this old-maidish rificial literary heroine to compensate for his silliness would never have—". Jenny inability to sacrifice real people. Sacrifice interrupts: requires not hatred but a concerned purpose and determination, a quality that Dud lacks. 'How can you, how dare you, say these His passivity that will not be roused by any things to me? Isn't it you who've always told me ... that real love had no need of—of what provocation angers and frustrates Wizzie you're talking about?' (401; 413) far more than would ordinary human fail- ings. Dud in his illusion of non-being dis- Teucer replies calmly that she, like everyone plays the false sanctity that equates virtue else, has misunderstood him: "you do the 24 "To Ravage and Redeem" i senses too much honour ... when you deny opening should remind the reader of them like this." (402; 414) Quite unreason- Thuella's mouth, when first seen by Dud: ably, for he has not been inconsistent, Jenny But the girl had painted her lips so red that her challenges her father: "If you mean what mouth in her white face seemed like a wound, you say, Father, throw those books of yours a wound that struck him at once as the out- into my stovel" Sacrifice is seldom logical ward sign of a complicated tragedy. or clear in motivation; Teucer has not From this crimson mouth there now poured wavered in his Platonism and yet he agrees forth a stream of high-pitched words, words to destroy the only books he reads, Timaeus that seemed like the spiritual blood of an and Phaedrus. Teucer is going to teach, and infinite grievance. (50; 62) to be understood, by the example of sacri- That a deep affinity develops between fice: Wizzie and Thuella may be owing to their 'It's a bargain, Jenny . . . Give yourself to shared experience of imaginative exploit- your man; throw this cruel virginity of yours ation. Dud's treatment of Wizzie as imper- into the fire, and I'll throw these books, which sonal "Woman" is matched by Teucer's in- are my life, into your stove! . . . This is a—a fliction on his daughter of such a name. covenant between us. You've always been my Teucer explains to Dud the origin of the dearest. You know that; and now I'm giving name, and Dud can sympathise with my best for you, more than my best! Shall we Teucer's assumption that name determines take'—he spoke almost exultingly at that character: moment—'the Sortes Platoniensesl Shall we see what they say before they die? Mark you, 'I called her Thuella, out of Homer. Thuella my girl. This isn't only your father's sacrifice means a storm-cloud; and so ... the clouds of speaking, this is your proud virginity speak- the sky, the dew of the dawn, the waves of the ing—before we give them both to the fire!' sea, and all other elemental beings are her (403-404; 415-16) passion.' (53; 65) The Phaedrus falls open on the final page: Powys may well be playing with a pun, or a possible etymological link between 'O beloved Pan,' the old man translated, in "Thuella" and the verb "thuo", "to offer a low intense voice, 'and all ye other gods of sacrifice". A recent French scholar, Henri this place, grant to me that I'—here he Jeanmaire, supposes a common etymon for paused and looked straight at [his daughter] the verb of sacrifice and the verb in who was trembling violently from head to foot while her fingers plucked at the fastening "Thuella", of storm-like action: of her black blouse—'and my dear daughter a verb whose sense remains somewhat ambig- here, may be made beautiful in our souls uous; it signifies to make a sacrifice, on the within!'(404; 416) one hand, and on the other to hurl oneself impetuously or to whirl around like some- Much of the poignancy of this passage thing caught up in a tempest.6 comes from the phrase inserted by the trans- lator who would more closely resemble Thuella escapes the prescription of her Socrates if he had no daughter. Teucer's father's imagination, to be instead the origin sacrifice exposes the fragile tension between of sacrifice. When next seen by Dud, at the the Platonist and the parent—and yet sac- Scummy Pond, Thuella was completely rifice may constitute the link between them. changed: "She was transformed, trans- In this moving scene, which is so reminis- muted, reborn", (194; 206) although she cent of King Lear, the less preferred still has scarlet lips (203; 215). The attribute daughter, Thuella, is not forgotten. At the of the crimson orifice has been carried over stove Teucer moves the kettle away from to Wizzie, who has herself been transformed: "the fiery red opening" (402; 414) where his She wore a dress he had never seen her in Plato will be immolated. The stove's before ... It was a wonderful fairy-like grey, "To Ravage and Redeem" 25 with filmy flounces and loose sleeves, and it love transform itself into—into the force had a romantic touch of rose colour at the that makes the mystery tremble!" (453; 465) bosom, like a wound from a spear. (204; 216- In this complicity with Uryen, Dud will do 17) nothing to relieve the misery of either In the scene between Jenny and her father woman. Sexual love might not make "the the red hole belongs to the stove at which the mystery" tremble, but it might bestow burnt offering is made. By these transform- mystery on persons; it might give to this ations, and by the transference from one to novel's dimly-realized, almost notional another of the signs of sacrifice—orifice, female characters the freedom of their own wound, blood—the three women are personalities. presented as sacrificial victims. Wizzie has found happiness nowhere in Three victims looking for executioners. the course of the novel. As Uryen looks back Being "No-man" Dud refuses to sacrifice to the Golden Age which might be recovered Wizzie; likewise by the Scummy Pond he by sterility, so Wizzie looks back with long- enjoys Thuella from a distance, "after his ing—to her seduction by Old Funky. The own cerebral fashion' '(198;210).His desire sight of Urgan injured in a fall reminds to be' 'No-man'' is akin to his father's desire Wizzie of the loss of her maidenhood: to ''put out the sun": both depend on steril- An emotion stranger than any she had ever ity, and in the terms of this novel the had, or than she was ever destined to have, opposite of sterility is sacrifice. A relation- flooded her being at the sight of that white ship between women is sterile, and hence to skull with the blood oozing from its wound. be encouraged by Uryen: The past swept over her with an overwhelm- ing rush; and it came into her mind that the 'It's nothing to you that I've taken your'— last time she had touched that slippery surface and he fixed his flaming eyes on Thuella— it was from the marks of her own nails that the 'feeling for you'—and he turned them on blood had come . . . Kneeling there, over that Wizzie—'to break through into the Mystery blood-stained skull, she reached the tragic that maddens me!' (454; 466) level of mortal feeling, where love and hate, blind savagery and infinite tenderness, melt Uryen is determined that his "Mystery" has into something for which there is no name. nothing to do with and will not be uncovered [Italics added] by sacrifice, as we learn from his response to What she had suffered, in shock and pain Dud's challenge of sincerity: and outrage, when she yielded her maiden- 'But the question is—do you believe in head to this grotesque creature, seemed to what's in it enough to fight for it, to sacrifice return upon her . . . women for it, to desert children for it?' (221- It returned softened, transformed, dissol- 22; 234) ved; no longer as a brutal violation, but as something in which, with a wild self-lacer- Uryen's answer "No, lad! Nol" is "decis- ation, she could even exult! ively and abruptly ejaculated" and is And what she felt now as she pushed aside followed by a more temperate explanation: his repulsive wig and examined his scalp- wound, was something that never for one "my gods aren't as real as your stick . . . and instant she had felt for her old D. How could a as to sacrificing women and deserting child- girl have any human feelings, good or bad, for ren I might do such things and I might not; but a person like D., who if you tickled him didn't if I did it wouldn't be proof of anything. I laugh and if you pricked him didn't bleed? might believe absolutely in my gods and yet ... as she bit her blood-stained fingers, refuse to sacrifice anything to them!" (222; what the girl said to herself, or rather what she 234) said to the unconcsious form beneath her, was something like this . . . "You taught me my Uryen's aversion to sacrifice is matched by job. You taught me my power. You taught me his exhortations to Wizzie and Thuella not my life. You re-created my body!" (444-45; to be "sacrificed" by men but "to let your 456-57) 26 "To Ravage and Redeem" The innuendo of sacrifice and sexuality that Maiden Castle trespasses on the unthink- runs through the novel punningly named able: that No-man might not be the protag- Maiden Castle and in the shadow-novel onist, or that no person might be the protag- Mary Charming, named after one hanged in onist; that No-man might be the author, or a place of sacrifice for a sexually-motivated that a novel might be without an author. murder, makes plain Powys's intentional Yet, for all its aspirations to pure polyphony inadequacy of characterization. Explicit and the anonymous status of myth, this reference within Maiden Castle to The novel finally acknowledges that such a Mayor of Casterbridge would be suicidal project is truly unthinkable: that the prota- were characterization to be the ground of gonist is only named, but is not, No-man; comparison.7 For all their difference of that Powys is not the functionary-scribe of philosophy and attitude, to others, to them- myth but the author. Albeit in modification selves, to Maiden Castle, the males are of the extreme claims of historicism, char- (except for Funky) bloodless. And through acters do have some say in their destinies, as the symbols of redness, wounds and great books need some say from great orifices, and the actuality of Wizzie's writers. bleeding and bloodied fingers, each of the Sacrifice mediates history and myth, females makes an offering of blood. nature and culture, balancing the demands Geoffrey Hill's "Genesis" is apposite: of stories with the demands of persons. Each By blood we live, the hot, the cold, of the male characters in Maiden Castle has To ravage and redeem the world: to "sacrifice" a female, to transform the There is no bloodless myth will hold. character from being a pawn in his story to The novel is lacking in plot and structure being a person on her own. On the outside of and characterization because the makers or the novel the author sacrifices its aesthetic bearers of the narrative are male mytholo- form by allowing the destruction and term- gisers, bloodless representatives of Platon- ination of each of the stories being told by ism and Communism or adherents of ster- the male characters. Any form, any pattern ility: all refuse, until the final section, the or system in its attempt to provide under- blood-offerings of the females. standing and significance does violence to The women are weakly characterized not reality, and achieves significance only at the because they are presented through male expense of the persons who are the objects eyes, but because for these males perception of study and meaning. Powys has, as it were, is akin to annihilation. As an exceptional made a compact with Teucer: the sacrifice of example of vitality almost every critic has the Forms—by which ''half a woman" is singled out Lovie, Wizzie's daughter by made whole—entails the sacrifice of form— Funky. As Funky is seen by Wizzie to have at by which significant characters become once violated and re-created her, so by the meaningless persons. Instead of meaning, creation of Lovie he has at once violated the mystery and life. abstract texture of the novel, and redeemed it by the measure of life. Funky has very little Dud's cudgel may also represent and be a understanding—his level of literacy is substitute for the writer's pen: Powys was an humorously presented—and yet his crude admirer of Joyce's Shem the Penman. "mythology" of lust and power is presum- Against Uryen's and Claudius's protests ably the very same that caused Maiden against excavation, that cudgel is on the last page dug into the soil of the cemetery. At the Castle and the Cerne Giant and Maumbury novel's opening, shortly before picking up Rings to be created, and Mary Channing to for the first time his oak cudgel, Dud decides be hanged. In their cerebralism the male to "postpone buying ink and paper and the characters who think about mythology are few other necessities he required till he had discontinuous with it. visited his dead in the cemetery." (13; 25) * * * "To Ravage and Redeem" 27 His ink and paper bring nobody to life, but to pay the penalty of being Something rather his cudgel is the sign of No-man's manhood. than Nothing." (315; 327) The penalty and The true representative of authorial creat- the miracle: to ravage and redeem. That is ion is Lovie, herself the child of vitality, the sacrifice of making others into persons, violence and blood. By scribbling on a scrap of making persons out of dolls, fictional of paper she creates a doll whom she names characters and other scraps of paper; and in Gwendolly. While playing with the doll turn we are the victims, dependent on Lovie is asked to tell her own name (asked by others, as much as is the paper doll, for our Uryen, of all disqualified inquisitors). escape from paper: "And like ourselves the Spectacularly, dazzlingly, Lovie offers a paper doll had had no choice." (315; 327) punning, cunning, ludic non-answer: The sacrifice that this novel barely and "Gwendolly's 'tending that Lovie isn't her subtly makes is to elevate persons above mummy." (309; 322) Punning, that is, on paper—be they bought women or even the "mummy" as "doll" (shades of emperor products of paternity. The centre to which and butterfly), and quibbling on pretence as Dud ultimately holds, and the full circle, are caring. A few pages on, Lovie is still playing: both represented by the fiery orifice into "the miracle was still going on at that warm which, in the interests of persons, this novel stove, a scrawled-over bit of paper becom- and even the works of Plato must be cast, ing a person with a past and a future!" that out of which—it can be supposed—may "And now," comments the narrator know- pour words of spiritual blood. ingly, "the paper doll like the rest of us had

NOTES 'All references included in the text refer to John 6Henri Jeanmaire, Dionysos, Paris, 1970, cited in Cowper Powys, Maiden Castle, London: Cassell, ReneGirard, Violence and the Sacred, London, 1977, 1937; Macdonald, 1967 and Picador, 1979 (identical p. 265. pagination). 7 It is worth noting that each of these three novels 2See Charles Lock, "John Cowper Powys and has the same pair of initials, MC, which happen also to James Joyce", in John Cowper Powys: The Center be the initials of the Powys mother, Mary Cowper. An and the Margins, ed. Denis Lane (forthcoming). argument that Powys intended such a pattern might be 3 For reflexion as sterility, see also 257; 269. "This supported by Dud's remarkable but essentially paren- cry of 'EchoV [local paper] always made him think of thetical speculation, in a novel much taken up with making love to Wizzie." paternity: "And after all, fathers are nothing! It's 4See also p. 329; 341: " 'I've left my stick in my who your mother is that matters." (161-62; 173) If room.' The babyish way he announced this . . . an- that is the case, why is Dud so little interested in noyed Wizzie." Cornelia Smith? Because he is attracted so strongly to 'Cited by Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and books and earthworks initialled MC? Mysteries, London, 1968, p. 156. Peter Christensen Wessex, 1272: History in John Cowper Powys's The Brazen Head

Although The Brazen Head, like Owen one hand, Aristotle, paganism, and male- Glendower and Porius is a historical novel, female sexuality, and, on the other, Trinit- if differs so much in scope and detail from its arian doctrine, Christian blood-sacrifice, predecessors that it seems to belong to and virgin sexuality. For him, "[s]paceison another genre, the romance, in which John the one side, Time on the other". The des- Cowper Powys specialized during his later truction of the Brazen Head represents the years. Indeed, The Brazen Head appears to vanquishing of the "Christian-theological be an "epic fantasy" surprisingly located in and thence scientific side of our opposition'' the Wessex of 1272 rather than in some in- by the "sexual Antichrist of Welsh affinities vented time and place. We know that the and occult powers".2 Glen Cavaliero, who weak king Henry III has come to the end of does not give a reading of the final scene in his long reign. His son, the aggressive and John Cowper Powys: Novelist, stresses the cruel future Edward I is away with Louis IX "regulative normal sexual power" of the on a long Crusade. Wales has not yet been couple Peleg and Ghosta. In contrast, Peter subdued. Peasant agitation threatens the Peregrinus and Lilith "misuse" their sexual social order. The Franciscans and Domini- energy and are likened to Satan and the first cans do not see eye to eye on ecclesiastical wife of Adam, respectively.3 John Brebner matters. The introduction of Aristotelian feels that the "Head and [Peter's] lodestone thought via Oxford and the University of are similar in having powers beyond those Paris has led to major problems in formul- 'in harmony with Nature'; they have no ating man's position in the world of matter. place in this world; consequently they In short, we have various conflicts which neutralize each other". The annihilation of typically go toward the making of the both the fiery ball and the Brazen Head dialectical give-and-take of the historical indicates the equivalence of their powers. novel. However, the novel's conclusion fails Brebner believes that the Brazen Head is to (or refuses to) give us a resolution of these Friar Bacon's "attempt to cerebralize the historical conflicts. Instead, the lovers Lilith pleasure" of sex; "the lodestone Peregrin- and Peter Peregrinus turn into a'' fiery ball" us's effort to actualize the pain".4 The three which falls on and destroys the Brazen readings appear incompatible. Whereas Head.' It seems as if the epic fantasy has left Knight sees male-female sexuality triumph- the historical novel behind. Consequently, ing over virginity, Cavaliero opts for normal we need to ask ourselves if history offers heterosexuality triumphing over perverted something more than a backdrop for the heterosexuality, and Brebner suggests (but working out of Powys's metaphysical does not state) an equivalency between speculations on sex, power, and religion. parthenogenesis/virginity and heterosex- uality. Nevertheless in all three cases, the When we turn to critics who have pub- dialectical interplay is not connected with lished on The Brazen Head, we see that the the historical givens of 1272 as presented in theme of history has not been foremost in the novel. their minds. G. Wilson Knight in The Sat- urnian Quest believes that the novel ranges It is the Brazen Head itself, finally speak- two sets of forces against each other: on the ing just before it is destroyed, which tells us The Brazen Head 29 that history must somehow be accounted for Father in Heaven', it is quite clear that he in this novel: " 'Time was,' it said. 'Time is,' spoke as a Jew, and that he was thinking of it said. 'And time will—'" (348). Knight the God of the Jews. (257) identifies this line as a quotation from Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Thus in the conflict between the educated Bungay (1594). Apparently, as the Head defenders of Aristotle and those accepting announces the existence of time in the the Christian view of creation we have a future, its own time of existence is ended as major reason for setting a work dealing with the "burning meteor" falls on it. The Head history in 1272. A crisis was ranging about suggests a time which always was and how history could be written. In our century reminds us of the Aristotelian notion of this question of the plotting of history has the eternal nature of matter as explained continued to be raised, particularly by R. G. by Albertus Magnus: Collingwood in his The Idea of History (1945) and Hayden White in his Metahistory According to the philosophy of the greatest of (1973), and we have seen an increased all philosophers—I speak of Aristotle—the interest in narratology over the last twenty material stuff of which the Cosmos is years. In Albertus's dilemma, a version of composed is eternal, and contains within the fall of man is inscribed: the division of itself the creative energy that builds the world man by the rival claims of reason and revel- and produces all the innumerable lives around ation, symbolized by the Brazen Head, con- us, such as we know and such as we are. But ceived by science, constructed to utter revel- we Christians have been given a—a—a—a—" (255) ations, and ultimately destroyed by the natural sexual forces unleashed by Peter and If matter is eternal, then a historical system Lilith. To support my claims I will examine which derives its meaning from either the the use of historical givens in the novel and creation, the incarnation of Christ, or the Powys's statements on chronicle and fate. Last Judgement distorts the world's tempor- The Brazen Head, like A Glastonbury Romance in Charles Lock's estimation, ality. Instead, we are left with a world in 5 which events simply succeed each other. offers us a polyphony of voices. To under- Powys incorporates this idea of the succes- stand it, we must be able to discover the sym- sion of events into the novel itself by having bolic value of events. the narrative voice continually refer to the The narrative is arranged in twenty-two story as a "chronicle" and by stressing the chapters forming six large sequences: 1-5, 6- element of chance at work in the world. The 1, 8-11,12-13 (all February 1272); 14-18,19- novel, which almost all readers have seen as 22 (all June 1272). Everything happens in shapeless, is shapeless to a purpose, and the the closing days of Henry Ill's reign. historical givens cannot be marshalled into However, even the most significant earlier an emplotted history. The chronicle struct- events of his rule, the battles of Lewes and ure, rather than the historical novel or the Evesham, are not mentioned, and the career epic fantasy (or romance) vouches for the of Simon de Montfort is evoked only in pas- Aristotelian view of matter, which Powys sing as we learn that Roger Bacon lost his accepts, without Albertus Magnus's simul- money in supporting the king in his resis- taneous belief in the Christian revelation. As tance to the barons. the Dominican teacher explains to Ray- mond de Laon: Because so little is known of the external events of the life of Roger Bacon, Powys If Matter is eternal, why then the world we had much free room in which to create his live in is like-wise eternal, for it is made of story. The last twenty-four years of Bacon's Matter or what the Greeks called "hulee"; life (1268-1292), after his second stay in and, if our world is eternal, it has not been Paris, are particularly obscure. A 1370 created by anyone. When Jesus talked of 'His chronicle states that Bacon was imprisoned 30 The Brazen Head by Jerome of Ascoli, Minister General of the scientist, particularly with metals and Franciscans, in 1277. In Powys's novel, he is minerals. He knows the charms of old already suffering a kind of imprisonment at women, as Powys also indicates. However, the time when St Bonaventure was still Min- the real Bacon sees Peregrinus as a good ister General. A schism in the Franciscan man who does not seek any reward for his Order would lead to the condemnation of labours. Peregrinus's Epistola de Magnete, the dissident friars at the Council of Lyon in according to Woodruff, dated 1269, was an 1274. However, the issue of Franciscan account of careful experimentation with a poverty in the role of the church is not made lodestone. clear as it is in The Name of the Rose, for Bacon was not generally given to writing example. kind remarks about his contemporaries, and Roger Bacon condemned magic, and Easton feels that Albertus Magnus is one of there is no evidence whatsoever for his creat- the scholars attacked, but not openly by ing a brazen head. The Famous Historie of name, in his writings.11 Bacon must have Fryer Bacon, written at the end of the six- known Albertus at the University of Paris teenth century by an unknown author gives after he went to France in 1257, on his us the legend. In the fifth narrative of this second trip. Whereas Albertus is treated by work, according to Evelyn Westacott, Powys in a sympathetic light, Bonaventure is Bacon makes a brazen head with Friar caricatured. Yet he deserves credit for trying Bungay' 'in order that the Head might speak to steer the Franciscan Order through the and enable Bacon to 'wall England about stormy issue of apostolic poverty. Presum- with Brasse' to prevent further con- ably, Bonaventure was in France in 1272, quests".6 The two friars fall asleep, and Albertus in Cologne. That they both after having ordered Miles the servant to could have met Bacon and Peter Peregrinus wake them when the Head spoke. The Head in Wessex is quite fantastical. proclaims "Time is", "Time was", and Against this first historical plot of the "Time is past", then falls down, waking its spiritual and intellectual struggles initiated creators. In the play of Thomas Greene, the by the University of Paris is set a second eleventh scene is devoted to this incident, as 7 historical plot concerning the closing years John Edwin Sandys notes. At the close of of the long reign of Henry III (1216-1272), the play, Bacon repents of his youthful fol- the vacillating son of King John. Powys lies, magic, and ambition (369). The inci- gives us no sense of the baronial reform dent is recalled in Pope's Dunciad (3.104) movement, culminating in the Provisions of and Byron's Don Juan (1.217), as well as Oxford (1258) and of Winchester (1259), other works of English literature before 8 and his treatment of Simon De Montfort is Powys. out of keeping with a liberal interpretation Powys does not mention what appears to of history. be Bacon's major work from the time Bacon supported Henry III against De around 1272, the fragment Compendium Montfort, as we learn in his first scene, Studii Philosophiae. It is much con- where he is thinking to himself: cerned with the approaching time of the The Legate could have soon found out, if he Antichrist, as Stewart C. Easton writes in his made any enquiries, how completely my biography of Bacon.' This Antichrist will family ruined itself by helping the King know science and make some use of it. against the Barons. Anyone who knows any- Perhaps Powys found here the inspiration to thing at all knows how much more liberty make Peter Peregrinus a self-proclaimed there has been under poor old Henry than Antichrist. As Francis Winthrop Woodruff there's ever been under the Barons and their tells us,10 Peter Peregrinus, or De accurst house of De Montford!" (92) Maricourt, is praised in Bacon's Opus Here it is not clear whether Bacon prefers Tertius, written in the 1260s, as a great the King to the barons because the King's The Brazen Head 31 rule is so weak that the people will benefit or themselves over each other! What we must because Henry is a better ruler in terms of realize is that life goes on exactly the same protecting the people. The reader tends to whether we're with them or without them! choose the latter option, since even a noble- When Lord Edward comes home from these man like the Baron of Roque looks for a absurd crusades we shall all know better strong central power. For him, it is person- where we stand. These damnable Scots want to be hammered into quiescence by somebody ified in Henry's son, the future Edward I, who understands the art of war, not the art of who was to remain away on a Crusade until changing metals. 1274, two years after his father's death. "And for these Welsh thieves who keep These attitudes, as depicted by Powys, invading this country, if once metal-changers cannot go unchallenged. According to R. F. and sorcerers really begin, as they seem to be Treharne, in his The Baronial Plan of beginning, to rule the world, it won't be long Reform, 1258-1263, DeMontfort's baronial before we shall be conquered by some British reforms were far better for the average robber who claims to be descended from citizen than the rule of Henry III. He writes Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar. (236) of the Council that ruled England from July Although we may take this diatribe lightly, 1258 to December 1259. as there was not much chance that For eighteen months the rule of the Council alchemists would overthrow the English was unchallenged, and, even more, was government in 1272, it diverts our attention supported by the approval and goodwill of from the issue of peasants' rights, as seen the whole realm, if we accept the King, a few through the figure of Dod Pole and the band of his intransigent relatives and friends, and of men he leads. In the final battle over the perhaps also a handful of the richer London Brazen Head, Dod Pole's peasants join with merchants. During this period the reformers King Henry Ill's men against the Barons, had a free hand to carry out their promises symbolized by the evil Lord Maldung and and reforms, not only unhampered, but with Lady Lilt; and the Church, symbolized by the full and enthusiastic support of public St. Bonaventure. opinion, and if we keep in mind the very important fact that they had, after all, only Dod Pole summons his men to action as eighteen months in which to work, we can follows: fairly judge them, for praise or blame, "I call upon you, my brothers and fellow according to their achievements during the workers,'' cried old Dod Pole, in the trumpet- period of their power. It immediately toned voice which had made him the prophet becomes clear that they set out to rule in no of these Wessex serfs for the last half century, narrow spirit of class selfishness and exclusive n "I call upon you to let these manor-lords with oligarchical power. their reeves and their bailiffs and their priests and their prelates, know, once for all, how Whereas Powys does not necessarily have we, the people of the West Country, really to agree with this assessment, his failure to regard them and hold them. We hold them to consider it, after having broached the topic, be thieves and robbers who claim the hell- is unfortunate. The Baron of Roque's born and not heaven-born right to hand down their stolen property from generation to gen- musings makes it sound as if the only choice eration! (324) was between a weak king or a strong king rather than an attempt at representative Dod does not seem to realize that the barons government. stand between the King and the freemen and villeins as a check against arbitrary rule. An What the Baron was thinking was: "All these confounded quacks, whether they call earlier speech of his to the bailiff of Roque themselves scientists or astrologists or makes him appear as much a Messianist as a alchemists or metaphysicians or inventors or defender of the rights of man: theologians, are only plotting to get power for I tell you a day will come when we shall have a themselves over other people and glory for King after our own hearts, a King as wise as 32 The Brazen Head Solomon, and as strong as Coeur-de-Lion, The contrast between Bacon and Albertus and as well-supported as Caesar, and with as Magnus is rooted in fact. Albertus is valued many magic weapons as King Arthur, who above Bacon by Powys as a deeper thinker: will raise us up and thrust you down! The truth was that Roger Bacon had taken You wait a bit, my good master bailiff, you Aristotle for granted with one side of his wait a bit, my noble lord, Sir Mort! A day will nature and the New Testament equally for come when it will be to a really great and true granted with the other side of his nature, and King chosen by us, yes! by us, who are now had never, as Albertus of Cologne did, serfs and slaves, that you and your barons will brought them into logical opposition to each have to come for the making of all the laws in other and into logical relation with each the land! (106) other. (335) How the people are going to choose their Albertus's superiority as a philosopher is sanctioned by A. B. Wolter in his evaluation king is not explained. Dod's statement 13 seems short-sighted, for the monarchy was of Roger Bacon. Nevertheless, once we not in a situation of being a friend of the have accepted Albertus as a greater thinker, common people against the barons, as we what are we to make of his viewpoint about see in the final battle. Furthermore, as the Aristotle? Albertus tells Raymond de Laon: Papacy had continually supported Henry "The first of these opinions [Aristotle's] is III, even under Alexander IV going so far as the one we hold when we follow our human to absolve him from obeying the Provisions reason. The second is the one we hold when of Oxford and Westminster, the alliance of we accept the view that Jesus is the Son of the Minister General of the Franciscans with God, and what he tells us about the universe is the nobles is quite curious. the truth. Which of these two views about the In this second historical plot the four beginning of things we as individuals accept will therefore depend upon how far we are forces come together in an actual conflict ready to follow Faith, when it goes beyond which seems quite counter to what we would Reason and even when if flatly contradicts the have actually expected in 1272. Thus we view derived from Reason. (257) have not a romance with history as a back- drop, but a type of counter-historical The novel offers no clear perspective on how fantasy. Since Powys obviously researched to view this statement. We may choose faith the period, are we supposed to allegorize the over reason or vice versa, or we may hold fantasy to reach 1956? Perhaps Dod Pole's that both need to be simultaneously main- men represent the proletariat; the barons, tained. To maintain them both we must see the middle class; the king, the Old Regime; faith and reason not as negations which and the Church, the opiate of the people. cancel each other out but as Blakean con- The novel can thus end with the victory of traries, Powys seems to want to get us to the poor over the Church-backed bourgeoi- read Albertus in a Blakean way. Otherwise, sie. The King's men simply serve as an Albertus's act of juxtaposition of faith and accessory to help explain proletarian victory. reason would not seem much different from Unlike the second historical plot, the first that of his fellow Christian, Bacon. one, involving Roger Bacon in the religious Instead of pitting the Franciscan against controversies of the day, has no obvious the Dominican, Powys takes another climax. In the last battle, there is no debate approach. He asks: what does the creation between the four historical thinkers, and of the Brazen Head mean if Aristotle is right Bonaventure flees to France. In addition, in believing that matter is eternal, and what Bonaventure and Peregrinus are too far does it mean if God brought the world into from their historical originals to provide us being? Bacon's wondering whether his with an undoctored confluence of historical creation is angelic or demonic has an forces. appropriateness for 1272, but we can still see The Brazen Head 33 the situation symbolically and ask what role torical characters, Boniface and Peter, who artistic/scientific creation has today. Bacon are set in motion by revelation. Bonaventure stands by his creation, and he defends has "illuminations" from on High (128). individualism and parthenogenesis. Unlike Peter believes he is called to be the Anti- Berdyaev, for example, who would see in christ. Addressing his lodestone, he says: human creativity a way of understanding " You, and you alone, come what may, in this God's creativity, Powys holds up the world or any other world, are my one true invention of the Brazen Head as a demonic love, and with you at my side I shall feel creation of a new Adam, that is, a manifest- myself to be the real and only real Antichrist, ation of man's continual rivalry with God. destined by the creative power of Nature her- The explosion of the demonic force during self to destroy once and for all this poisonous, Albertus's vigil with the Head indicates this this corrupt, this rotting, this suppurating, point. (270) this decomposing, this contaminatory, this fulsome, this fetid, this fatal farce of an Although Albertus is impressed by the explanation of life, based on a crazy belief in Head, he associates human creativity with the Persons of the Trinity." (325) procreation to an extent far beyond what Bacon would. Shortly before the final Appointed by Nature, Peter becomes Anti- conflict, Albertus declares that sex is the matter as well as Antichrist. Combined with "maddest force there is" (336) and marries Lilith in the ball of flame, he attacks the Una and Tilton. In contrast, Bacon tells Head. The sexual union of Peter and Lilith John that it is not essential for him to marry destroys the Head, symbol of parthenogen- and that: etic human creativity. Procreation tries to "As long as we are considerate to other make sense of life in one way, art/science in people . . . and as kind and sympathetic another, and they cannot be easily recon- towards them as our circumstances permit, ciled. Nevertheless, art/science have little we have all got to live to ourselves, for our- value if the human community cannot selves, in ourselves and by ourselves. This is continue. Thus the suicidal death of the how, as Aristotle teaches, matter produces us lovers prevents the Head from saying "Time out of itself, as a product to satisfy its deep will be", for there will be no extended 'privation'; or its desperate yearning and human time without procreation. Obvious- craving to possess what it feels it could ly, to make sense of the destruction of the proceed from it, but what, so far in its long history, has not proceeded from it! (340-41) Head, we have had to allegorize the first his- torical plot as well as the second. This side of creativity, based on Aristotelian The narrative voice does not reveal how to premises, does not suggest the demonic. So regard the destruction of the Brazen Head, from the psychically split inventor issues a but we are told that Bonaventure runs away creation demonic only halfway. It is not from the "tragic drama" going on around likely that Bacon would agree with Albert- him in the last chapter. (327) As we are not us's notion that "[w]hen we Christianize concerned here with the fall of a great indiv- marriage, it is to demonstrate our share in idual, the tragedy must attend the irreconcili- Christ's own desperate and eternal act of able forces in action: the feeling that creat- faith that He was the son of God" (336). ivity is both angelic and demonic in God's Thus when G. Wilson Knight contends that universe, and the fact that human creativity male-female sexuality is aligned with and individualism do not easily mesh with Aristotle in the novel, he does not seem able procreation. We can see that this tragedy is to account for this difference between the divorced from the politics of the other plot. two philosophers. This constitutes a chief weakness of the Despite the importance of faith to both novel. The two strands simply do not unite. Bacon and Albertus, they appear to be very Having used historical givens to create his rational men compared to the other two his- symbols, Powys does not ask us to interpret 34 The Brazen Head the novel according to historical forces. We ded to earth the right way up" (337-38). In are not in the world of Sir Walter Scott, short, history offers man little in the way of enshrined forever by Georg Lukacs. Instead, meaning because the major forces at play in Powys thwarts reader expectations by dec- the world are timeless psychological and laring that his work is a chronicle rather than natural ones. Yet this point about history's a history and by appealing to chance rather lack of authority cannot be made unless than historical causality. According to there is some history there to be denied. A Hayden White, the chronicle offers us an novel set in contemporary times could not "ironic denial that historical series have any make the point as well. Paradoxically, how- kind of larger significance or describe any ever, the novel doubles back upon itself. In imaginable plot-structure or can even be the final battle centred on the peasants' construed as a story with a discernible beg- struggle with the nobles, we have the seeds inning, middle and end". Events turn of a pro-Labour reading of history in the out to have "nothing other than seriality as ultimate victory of the workers. Finally, we their meaning".14 In the novel, meaning can feel that this tension between historical resides in allegory rather than history. When meaning and the world of eternal constants the Brazen Head is knocked to the ground proves The Brazen Head to be a weak novel. shortly before its destruction, Powys does On the other hand, we can say that the not appeal to any historical laws but says, meeting of historical and ahistorical forces "By what some would call Providence, is like the meeting of the fiery red ball and others Chance, and yet others the protective the Brazen Head, and stop waiting for power of the Devil, the Brazen Head descen- oracles to set us straight.

NOTES

'TheBrazen Head, London: Macdonald, 1956, p. 'John Edward Sandys, "Roger Bacon in English 347. (Subsequent numerals in parentheses within my Literature", Roger Bacon: Essays, ed. A. G. Little, text refer to this edition.) New York: Russell & Russell, 1972, 345-72, p. 368. 2G. Wilson Knight, The Saturnian Quest: A Chart 'Ibid., p. 372. of the Prose Works of John Cowper Powys, London: 'Stewart, C. Easton, Roger Bacon and His Search Methuen; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1964, p. 106. for a Universal Science, New York: Columbia, 1952, 3Glen Cavaliero, John Cowper Powys, Novelist, p. 137. Oxford: Clarendon, 1973, p. 142. 10 Francis Winthrop Woodruff, Roger Bacon: A "John A. Brebner, The Demon Within: A Study of Biography, London: James Clarke, n. d., p. 47. John Cowper Powys's Novels, New York: Barnes & "Op. Cit., p. 210. Noble, 1973, p. 217. 12 R. F. Treharne, The Baronial Plan of Reform, 5Charles Lock, "Polyphonic Powys: Dostoevsky, 1258-1263, Manchester: University of Manchester Bakhtin, and A Glastonbury Romance", University Press, 1971, p. 347. of Toronto Quarterly, 55.3 (Spring 1986), 261-81. "Allan B. Wolter, "Roger Bacon", Encyclopedia 'Evelyn Westacott, Roger Bacon in Life and of Philosophy, New York: Macmillan, 1967. Legend, New York: Philosophical Library, 1953, p. 14 Hayden White, Metahistory, Baltimore: John 72. Hopkins University Press, 1973, p.55. H. W. Fawkner

John Cowper Powys and Ontotheology

The purpose of this essay is to open an onto- We can schematize the tension between logical horizon of inquiry in Powys criticism. ontotheology and its opposite as the tension Ontology, of course, as the study of Being, between the philosophy of Hegel and the addresses the largest possible issues solicited writing of Jacques Derrida, between Hegel's by man: one puts pressure on the "is" of "Absolute" and Derrida's "dissemin- reality, asking questions about the way ation". Hegel saw Christianity as the final things are. Since such a sphere of investi- and most glorious religion, and its glorious gation becomes cosmic and all-inclusive, all subtlety came from its synthetic conception ontology in the final analysis approximates of love. "Love", here, is not simply a feel- theology, or at least the kind of enigmas that ing between two amorous beings, but the theology traditionally discusses. "Being", general cosmic motion that brings inert and the object of study for ontology, assumes "cold" objectivity back into the Absolute the features of "God", the object of study Subject ("Spirit", God, Idea, Concept, for theology. As these two fields of thought Mind). The universe is a vast act of copul- merge into "ontotheology", the modern ation, an astronomically infinite love- thinker, doubting the universal mastery of making, in the course of which reality God/Being, acquires a target that can be becomes increasingly known to itself as the constantly aimed at during the various truth of its own ongoing possibility. When phases of his dissent. As I shall try to show in the sum total of all the planes of complex this essay, John Cowper Powys's writing love-making (self-consciousness) has finally generally speaking takes the shape, precisely, been refined into a comprehensive hologram of a defiance of ontotheology. The defiance of Absolute Truth, the "dialectic" has of Being and God, however, is not a achieved its purpose and meaning: negation suggesting that Being and God do Being/God knows that it is; "is-ness" and not "exist". What is constantly suggested, knowledge are one. Derrida, attempting also instead, is that Being/God is not all that to overcome Heidegger's conception of exists; or, put differently, that the cosmic mastery of Being/God is drastically limited. Being/God, challenges Hegel's love-oriented The vital and dynamic aspects of reality Block Universe by introducing the notion of manifest themselves "outside" Being/God, a "dissemination" that bursts through the in a margin or borderland that does not fall circular wall of Love/Truth/God/Being. inside the ontotheological circle of meta- There is, he argues, a vigorous pulse that physical appropriation. furiously and joyfully overshoots the limits of "Being". The ejaculated seed, far from I shall be focusing on three novels in this serving the exclusive purpose of triggering a essay: Maiden Castle, Weymouth Sands, new synthesis (inside Being), travels wildly and Wolf Solent.1 In each of these works, into an adventurous margin beyond con- love is absolutely central as an organizing ception (outside Being). structure—and it is precisely by considering If we look with the slightest care at John John Cowper Powys's very original treat- Cowper's writing, we shall see that he ment of love that we can gauge the radical returns on countless occasions to this kind nature of his ontological thought. of problematic, and that his ontological per- 36 John Cowper Powys and Ontotheology egrinations usually show him taking the logical paradigm by means of an entire "Derridean" (rather than "Hegelian") spectrum of sly erotic strategies. Precisely side.2 The discussion between Wolf Solent because this sidestepping is a quite self-con- and T. E. Valley on love is paradigmatic: scious and deliberate procedure, the abnor- Valley claims that "every kind of love, even mality or oddness of the individual act in no the most insane and depraved—even incest, way whatsoever needs to be seen as a for instance—is connected with religion and function of some congenital disposition: touches religion"; but Wolf, insisting on the homosexuality, bisexuality, impotence, radical discontinuity between opposed frigidity, and so forth. The sexual deflect- forms of love, refuses to believe in a ion, or deviation, is thrown into vivid liter- common Ground or Being for reality (WoS, ary and metaphysical poignancy by the fact 133). For Valley, "love sinks down into the that its desiring subject is constitutionally roots of the whole world" (133); but Wolf intuited as normal rather than disturbed, does not think "that most of the kinds of potent rather than timid, fecund rather than love we run across sink down to the bottom sterile. To have an erotically eccentric indiv- of the universe" (134). Not only are there idual in an erotically eccentric act of forms of love that evade Being as Ground pleasure is ontologically speaking to have ("bottom of the universe"); also, most something far less dynamic and imaginative forms of love are outside knowledge (133). than an erotically normative individual with Nobody really "knows very much about an absolutely eccentric programme of love". The central axis of ontotheology— sensual self-development. Being, Love, Knowledge, Self, God, Truth A first way of deflecting love from Being —is broken up. There are margins of and its dialectical copulations of binary mysterious and dark unknowledge that opposites is to celebrate a love that falls upset the centre. short of consummation. In Weymouth I am arguing, then, that John Cowper Sands, Perdita feels that the spiritual rapp- uses a displaced apprehension of love as a rochement between the Jobber and herself lever to overthrow ontotheology in general. makes physical ravishment strangely super- I shall now review the nature of this dis- fluous (WeS, 345). This rather conventional placed love before the act of deepening the notion is only a fragment of a much wider engagement with the general question of structure of suggestion, however, and the Being. wider horizon of implication can be gauged by considering Uryen's soliloquy on erotic II eccentricity in Maiden Castle. Man can "break through" the dialectical house of It is of course a well-known fact that John Being, if he allows emotion to become so Cowper foregrounded somewhat unusual extreme that the dialectical opposition pain/ types of love; but my current interest is not pleasure disintegrates: this dislocation itself, but the manner in 'It is a feeling so terrific that it often ends in which the displacement constantly comes to madness; but if it doesn't end that way, it ends suggest a disruption of Being. Ideally, Being in breaking through . . . And this . . . only —as Creation propagating its own stable comes when the passion remains sterile. Any identity—needs to be conceived as fecund fulfilment dissipates its power. Nothing but copulation. Love ought to be teleological, unfulfilled love . . . can beat hard enough purposeful, aimed in a straight and uncom- upon the barrier of life' (MC, 236; 248). plicated line at the extension of Being—at an Let us capture the various features of act of consummation in which the loving emphasis: (1) collapse of dialectical oppos- subject is swallowed by the cosmic process ites, (2) sterility, (3) nonfulfilment, (4) that he happens to be expressing. But the explosion of the wall of Being ("the barrier Powys hero sidesteps this plainly ontotheo- of life"). John Cowper Powys and Ontotheology 37 The "side-steering, controlling, curtail- ic inhibition or puritan sublation; for the ing of the great erotic force that creates the "virginal detachment" (WoS, 236) of a girl world" (WeS, 382), this vast evasion of like Christie Malakite belongs to the order Being/God,3 very often involves an affirm- of what is already knowingly provocative ation of virginity. In Weymouth Sands, rather than to the order of orthodox timid- Sylvanus Cobbold has given up life as a ity. Wolf sees a china bowl full of bluebells, hermit, because he has discovered that he primroses, pink campions and meadow- can only attain "the Absolute" through the orchids (234) and inserts his fingers between souls of women; yet the women who help the stalks into the water (235); but this odd him overcome the limitations of "masculine move—hovering undecidedly somewhere reason" are not women that he really ever between the clinically gynecological and the makes love to (WeS, 272). There is "some- symbolically occult—suggests no shyness, thing in virginity" (262), some "evasive in the ordinary sense, in spite of the fact that point" (271)in "eroticvirginity" (272), that Wolf feels that his entry is an entry into the builds toward a heightened atmosphere of depths of his woman. In fact, Wolf actually "unravished obsession" (ibid). Because the manages to deepen a crucial dimension of erotic mainstream is, as it were, blocked, the erotic power that is already central to his erotic energy is dissipated. From this there entire involvement with Christie: the girl's follows a general erotic radiation, so that the ability to attract in terms of absence rather erotic subject, who lacks a fixed and solid than presence, distance rather than centred- partner, diffuses erotic thought into the ness, mystery rather than Being. She is entire space of perception. "Just because of "completely inscrutable to him" (ibid.), her chastity", Ruth Loder's enjoyment of and the strange sequence of erotic moves the inanimate landmarks in Weymouth is that Wolf inaugurates needs to be seen as exalted, passionate, quasi-erotic (303). In integral to a negative seduction: a process of Wolf Solent, Christie Malakite, as a girl seduction and courting that can have no true "descended" from Merlin whose mother centre for its desire and no positive fulfil- "was a nun" (WoS, 233), has a power of ment for its ultimate consummation. erotic presence that is "diffused", Taking place in Non-Being rather than "permeating everything around" the lovers Being, as it were, the to-and-fro of love's (232). This type of "diffusion" also skirmishes cannot follow the code of characterizes the erotic magic of Wizzie dialectical, commonplace routines. Ravelston in Maiden Castle (MC, 474; 486): the "diffusion of her desirability through If passion is the normative event in lit- the earth" is a function of the apparent erary romance, the Powysian romance capacity of her body to "diffuse itself" deviates from this norm and centre by fore- (ibid.). grounding erotic movements that are either more or less than passion. There is between Instead of a frozen and fixed erotic Wolf Solent and Christie Malakite "some- centre, then, the text seems to affirm an thing deeper than passion" (WoS, 240); and, erotic dissemination: objective as well as conversely, the hero of Maiden Castle feels subjective, physical as well as mental. that his rejection of passion's "horrible" (These binary oppositions are themselves nature is the result of mere "cold-blooded moved toward dissolution by the dissemin- lust" (MC, 258; 271). Whereas Dud No- ating impetus.) The erotic presence of the Man's "coldly vicious" interest in the erotic desired woman is almost physically and woman may give the impression of an atti- chemically outside the empirical frame of tude that falls short of true passion, Wolf her mere biological being, and this means Solent's displacement of orthodox passion that the lover can touch her intimately seems to be the function of emotions that are without making commonplace physical too complex and refined for mere romance. contact. It is not a question, here, of platon- This difference between the two Powys 38 John Cowper Powys and Ontotheology heroes is rather illusory, however; for just as the study of relations between units. Follow- the "vicious" sensuality of Dud No-Man is ing this paradigm, the scholar would no based on something as "entirely imagin- doubt want to identify the various units ative" (MC, 258; 271) as Wolf's most subtle (people, events) in the Powys novel, and responses to Christie, so Wolf's general then "explain" the action of the novel in erotic impetus is energized by precisely the terms of the "relations" between these kind of "vicious" sensuality that Dud stable units. But what if the units are second- affirms. The fact that the desire for Christie ary? What if the "relations", already, can move "above" passion is linked to the precede the units? What if the character, fact that the love for Gerda can move before he exists either in his world or on the "below" it—or at least on a more directly page, is caught in a to-and-fro that solicits sensual level (WoS, 249, 251, 277). his being and destabilizes any fixed identity The erotic cleavage in Wolf Solent—his that he could have? simultaneous affection for two quite differ- Is there first a character called Wolf ent women—is of course no isolated event in Solent and then a sequence of problems and the Powys world. In Weymouth Sands, the tensions that causes him to vibrate and fluc- beauty of Curly Wix is so stunning that one , tuate? Or is there—from the outset—a man alone cannot hope to completely certain fluid indecision, erotic and cosmic, master and possess it: "such loveliness that gives birth to the kind of spiritual glob- almost had a right to be supported by one ulation that we (and Wolf) calls "Wolf man and loved by another" (WeS, 370). If Solent?" erotic power in this way tends to be multirel- What I am trying to suggest, here, is that ational, that is so because of its essentially John Cowper does not present a stable hero suprarelational force. What we are taught to who gets disrupted by a "crisis". Rather, think of as "human relations" (a sine qua the crisis, or perpetually ongoing internal non of the modern novel according to indecision, is there from the start as the orthodox literary theory) plays a secondary hero's condition of possibility: literary as role in the Powys novel for the simple reason well as mundane, artistic as well as "real". that the ecstatic force in John Cowper's The Powys hero grows, materializes, and erotic visions burns "human relations" to comes into view only inasmuch as he cinders: Gerda's aesthetic appeal and suggests his own presence in terms of con- physical beauty is so astonishing "that it tradiction and central self-absence. There- seemed to destroy in a moment all ordinary fore, he does not solidly or empirically human relations" (WoS, 58). It is not a precede the kind of metaphysical and erotic question, here, of a breakdown of faithful- dilemmas that he engages with during the ness into unfaithfulness, the monogamic course of the action; on the contrary, the into the polygamic, ordinary human rel- hero first presents himself as precisely one ations into extraordinary human relations. who is paradigmatically and eternally torn For there is no simple matrix or stable erotic asunder by metaphysical and erotic con- dialectic from the outset. The Powys novel tradictions—contradictions, indeed, that does not show us the "decline" or "fall" of are structurally and logically irresolvable. a human individual: his loss of healthy Because of this original contradiction in the "identity", his failure to maintain "social hero's very window of first possibility, the interaction" with other "individuals". novel does not follow the traditional logical Rather, the novel from the outset inscribes movement from stability to crisis and then itself with a visionary field of suggestion back to stability. Instead, the hero slides on where the neo-classicist rationalization of a variety of simultaneously present levels reality is displaced. According to that through numerous displacements and shifts "rationalist" reality, the world consists of of perspective, so that the innermost ele- (1) units, (2) relations between units, and (3) ments of his enigmatic disposition are John Cowper Powys and Ontotheology 39 thrown into new and astonishingly bright ical or mechanical: clearly, what I am calling combinations of spiritual suggestion. What "Non-Being" cannot be a mere dialectical orchestrates these interior movements of opposite and negation of Being, for that self-generating dislocations is no "centre" kind of Nothingness would be a mere or solid nucleus that the hero could possess vacuum and void. It is indeed precisely this as "identity" or "personality". Rather, the evasion of the dialectical "either—or" that aesthetic and metaphysical sense of organic causes me to define the ecstatic force comprehensiveness is a function of richness opposing the mother as "quasi-masculine" as such: of our sense that a mind of such rather than masculine. At this level of immense receptiveness and multiple affilia- literary and ontological complexity, we can tion—much like Shakespeare's own magnif- never end up with something as banal as an icent spirit—can never lose itself in the opposition between mother and father, vastness of the world, since that vastness is woman and man. the rounded horizon of the imaginative soul Once the danger of dialectical simplific- itself. ation is recognized, however, it is easy to perceive that Wolf Solent structures itself in Ill terms of a negation of love in so far as love is an affirmation of mere Being. "Love was a As I have already suggested, the diffusion of possessive, feverish, exacting emotion. It the erotic centre opens an ontological demanded a response. It called for mutual horizon of inquiry, inasmuch as the dis- activity. It entailed responsibility. The placement of One Woman (whether mother thrilling delight... the deep satisfaction he or mistress, origin or end) comes to suggest a derived from [certain] things had nothing in displacement of Being as such.4 Wolf [it] that was either possessive or responsible. Solent's ecstatic freedom—what he calls his And yet, he lost all thought of himself ..." "mythology"—is associated with Wey- (WoS, 43). Love, then, is repulsive inas- mouth and with his father, and as a contrast much as it is "possessive" and dialectical to this magnetic field, the mother threatens ("demanded a response"). Ecstasy, as the with the weight and prosaic solidity of Being motor of Wolf's crucial "mythology", is by itself (WoS, 291). As matrix and as the Great contrast nonpossessive and nondialectical. Inside, the mother pulls Wolf inward, The ecstatic negation of possession and dia- toward Being and life. In a sense, there is a lectic does not simply have practical or tension between a centripetal, maternal psychological implications. It is not just a force, sometimes advanced by Gerda and question of giving up the loved one as the mother in conjunction (251), and a non- objectified possession. Instead, it is a quest- maternal, ecstatic, outward-moving force— ion of negating the entire ontotheological associated with Christie, Weymouth, and conception of the universe. According to the eternally absent father. (He can only be this orthodox conception—promoted by absent, be absence; for he is dead.) state religion and dialectical philosophy This crucial megastructure can be schem- since Plato—the universe, as completely atized as a tension between Being and Non- self-mastering Being, possesses itself by Being. The mother, as matrix and as symbol means of its metaphysical (and therefore of centred love (love-as-centre), suggests dialectical) understanding and knowledge Being (existence as given, a biological fact, of itself. According to this classical scheme, mere here-ness, being-here), while the Being (or God, if you will) fully knows itself ecstatic, quasi-masculine forces suggest by means of an internal reflection (learning, Non-Being as that which freely stands out philosophy) set up inside the building of (ex-stasis) from Being. It should be emphas- existence. The more the dialectical extremes ized, of course, that the tension in this of this building love one another, the closer crucial megastructure is not strictly dialect- does the entire structure of Being come to 40 John Cowper Powys and Ontotheology the absolute centre and essence of its own- identify Wolf's "mythology" as something most truth. that privileges ecstasy at the expense of love. Thinkers like Nietzsche, Powys, and The leading idea in Wolf Solent is the notion Derrida distrust and question this ontotheo- of a general assault on the "mythology". logical paradigm (and thus also ontology Since this "mythology" very clearly is the as such in so far as it serves the purpose of scenario of ecstasy itself (517), the attacks merely recording the inert glory and nature on the "mythology" are in fact attacks on of Being). The resistance and distrust come ecstasy. The things that "threatened this about through the recognition of ec-static ecstasy" (414), this "trance-like 'mytholo- aspects of human desire: for instance in gy' of his" (106), are to a large extent gover- moments of writing or infatuation, when ned by love—and this complicates Wolf's life is carried violently outside Being. In overall strategy immensely, since the dimen- such moments of "white heat", or absolute sion of erotic desire in his soul is linked not self-forgetting, the spirit leaps into a margin only to "love" but also to ecstasy. On the of Nothingness. Why "Nothingness"? one hand, his "mythology" must resist the Because the zone of ecstatic revelation that world as such, what is mundane and cynic- is broached is utterly new. In other words, ally prosaic: "Would his inner world of the literary genius, imagining some absol- hushed Cimmerian ecstasies remain unin- utely extraordinary dramatic or poetic con- vaded by these Otters and Urquharts'' ? (20). ception, like the lover discovering some On the other hand, he must resist a sphere of astonishingly fresh combinations of erotic suggestion where woman threatens to aesthetic delight in his mistress, is conceiv- collapse the alien dimensions of ecstasy and ing something that is completely outside love into a single emotional nexus. creation as it existed a moment ago. What is As the crucial seduction scenes with conceived is not a unit of a world already Christie Malakite demonstrate, it is almost created by God, not an aspect of completed impossible to draw a line between love and creation happening to get rekindled by the ecstasy when the individual comes under the fire of passive human inspiration. Rather, pressure of erotic praxis; yet in its rich what is illuminated during the glorious material of metaphysical and psychological moment of visionary advance is something commentary, the novel quite clearly disting- entirely new. uishes the dialectical and biologically I have just used the word "conceive'' in a fecund sphere of "love" from the supradia- deliberately equivocal manner in order to lectical and "sterile" sphere of ecstasy. suggest the difference between ontotheolo- Physical beauty provokes lust; but taken gical and Nietzschean apprehensions of con- "beyond a certain point", that same erotic ception. The Nietzschean scheme (that John beauty "is destructive of lust" (WoS, 91). Cowper affirms) apprehends the moment of Hence Gerda, as one who is aesthetically radical conception not as a dialectical con- "flawless", to begin with enhances the very ceiving (copulating with a polar opposite to "mythology" that she later comes to produce a synthetic offspring as self-re- subvert and threaten. She attains "that flection), but as a reckless and self-forget- magical level of loveliness which absorbs ting leap into the utterly unknown. This with a kind of absoluteness the whole aes- negation of Being as the locus of inwardly thetic sense, paralysing the erotic sensibil- dialectical self-propagation can be gauged ity" (ibid.) This kind of perception of in Wolf's recurrent rejection of anthropo- "love" as something inferior to ecstasy is centric and biocentric patterns of life: paradigmatic around the Powys hero. In "Everything that copulates, everything that Maiden Castle, Dud No-man is frustrated carries its young, how good if it vanished in by the inability of Wizzie and Thuella to one great catastrophe" (WoS, 413). truly grasp his intuition of ecstatic aware- ness: It is precisely at this juncture that we can John Cowper Powys and Ontotheology 41 'What I can't get you people to see,' D. was not only in esoterically enthusiastic char- saying, 'is that when, in that bit of road, for acters like Uryen in Maiden Castle, but also instance, between the barracks and in men like Dud No-man who remain cold Poundbury, which is now one of my favourite and sceptical vis-a-vis the entire realm of walks, I come on a patch of green moss on a occult suggestion: Dud believes "absolutely grey wall, or catch the peculiar scent of trodden grass, I get a sensation that's more in another dimension surrounding this one" important than what you call 'love', or (MC, 232; 244). It is in moments of peak anything else, nearer the secret of things too! awareness, or altered consciousness, that It is 'Love' in a certain sense; but it's love of the individual becomes the privileged obser- life itself and of something that comes to us ver of this dimension. (I now quote the pass- through life!' (MC, 353; 365) age that proves John Cowper's identifica- tion of this "parallel" dimension as the The equivocation is crucial, here: the sphere of Non-Being.) ecstatic "sensation" is and is not love. It is this type of contradiction that permits Dud now became conscious of a weird ecstatic love to be at once a negation and sensation that he had once or twice before in affirmation of love (in the ordinary sense) in his life; namely, the parallel existence of quite the Powys novel. In Weymouth Sands, different layers of reality. It was a disturbing immediately after a peak moment of altered sensation and it made all reality a little shaky, awareness {WeS, 344), Perdita Wane comes as if there were yawning gulfs of Not-Being to recognize that the ecstatic quality of her under every particular manifestation of Being desire for the Jobber in fact is perfectly con- (MC,71;84). comitant with a slight dislike for the man (345). As she scrutinizes her lover with Two crucial movements should be obser- absolutely limpid intellect, "tearing away ved in this commentary: (1) the unit every shred of sentiment, every tag of rev- ' 'under'' creates precisely the kind of ontol- erence", she arrives at a kind of spiritual ogical conception that Hegel worked with, zero-point: a state of cosmic nudity in which the idea that Nothingness is integral to Being the spirit has got rid of all emotion and senti- as its first and central condition of possibil- mental prejudice, recognizing itself exclus- ity—a notion that contains all the seeds of ively as its own fierce desire to leap forth into latterday "dissemination" theories and the other (ibid.). "decentered" scientific paradigms, since to posit Non-Being as the central unit of creation is to posit a dramatic void and non- IV centre in the middle of what is; (2) the unit So far, the introductory nature of my "shaky" anticipates the kind of post-onto- remarks have merely sketched the Powysian logical and post-phenomenological thought tension between Being and Non-being in a that Jacques Derrida forwards whenever he tentative and rather general fashion. But if uses the word "solicit" in his paradigmatic we examine the texts in detail, we can see and innovative sense of "shake". To solicit that the Being/Non-Being opposition is the question of Being (rather than to merely explicitly identified as an ontological or re-open it, as Heidegger did) is to perform onto-psychological macrostructure. The the kind of radical shaking of Being that major works of John Cowper Powys con- John Cowper privileges. The "disturbing stantly return to the idea of "another sensation" of universally but secretly active Dimension"—an idea that is easily mis- "Not-Being" is a dislocation of the reassur- construed as a naive reference to some ing centre of Being—something that "made vulgar sphere of spectres, poltergeists, and all reality a little shaky" (ibid.). occult visitations. This apprehension of Since John Cowper Powys is a novelist Non-Being as a dark and vital margin quite rather than an ontologist or professional outside centralizing Being can be discovered philosopher, he obviously needs to work 42 John Cowper Powys and Ontotheology with concrete and vivid images rather than ground and substance of Weymouth Sands, with abstract metaphysical categories or is shown in the novel to be subject to various scholastically obscure abstractions; there- states and stages of fragmentation (into fore expressions like "the astronomical boulders in the quarry, pebbles in the hands world" tend to replace the philosopher's of Jobber and Perdia, and so forth), John "Being"—as for instance in Weymouth Cowper can use the idea of sand to project Sands, when the philosopher Richard Gaul an encompassing sense of the dissemination claims that "in every human soul there is of the ground of Being. Sand, as the sweep- something that is beyond and outside the ing outline of the entire beach, is the rock astronomical world" (WeS, 161). It is Non- and basis of the world taken to the optimal Being—the unknown, that which does not point of absolute dispersion. It is the univer- yet belong to Being/Knowledge/Man—that se of stable oolite shaken down to myriads in this way is on the "outside"; and this of tiny grains—and this end-product is in the notion, far from being the exclusive prop- final analysis beyond human mastery erty of the philosopher Richard Gaul, is (beyond any process of counting, calcul- integral to the entire artistic and metaphys- ation, control). The beach, as the locus of ical conception of the novel. When the this disseminated ground itself, is of course Jobber contemplates the death (the non- projected as the paradigmatic site for the on- being) of his enemy and of himself, Non- going negotiation between Being and its Being in general asserts itself as an incoming other. The hypnotically fascinating "wedge of appalling reality of a different (non)difference between "wet sand" and dimension altogether from any as yet known "dry sand" is systematically foregrounded in our experience" (349). But Non-Being as a difference that has something special to does not only manifest itself in other charac- say. Liminality, or absolutely immediate ters (outside the private metaphysical obses- engagement with otherness (Non-Being, the sions of Richard Gaul); it also throbs like an unknown), is permanently on show in the incomprehensible pulse through the inani- cryptic tension between the two "states" of mate objects of Weymouth. As the Jobber the beach. stares vacantly at St John's spire and the statue of Queen Victoria, the objects recede "into some remote psychic dimension", a V site where their reality is not mastered as something exactly knowable (64). Indeed, Most of us tend to think of identity and the narrator himself adopts much of Gaul's difference as opposites: we think of a unit as ontological thinking, when he discusses a something lacking difference, and we think radical and irreducible alterity in the various of difference as the rupture and discontin- parts of a universe that is fragmented. uity between such units. Difference holds "There are moments in almost everyone's things apart; unity holds things together. life when events occur in a special and Hegel's logical genius defined itself primar- curious manner that seems to separate that ily by exposing this intuitive schematization fragment of time from all other fragments. of unity and difference as a fallacy. With [It is] as if there were a spiritual screen, tremendous originality of thought, Hegel made of material far more impenetrable realized that difference itself is what makes than adamant, between our existing world unity impossible. I can only get out of my bed of forms and impressions and some other every morning through the bed's ability to be world" (48-49). This "other world", as different from everything else; thus the something outside this world (outside threshold and difference between bed and Being), cannot be Being. It must negate it. non-bed, inside and outside, itself makes Or (to avoid the notion of dialectical to-and- possible the smooth passage from one to the fro) solicit it: shake it. Because stone, as the other. In other words, "communication" between things is not made possible by John Cowper Powys and Ontotheology 43 common properties that they may have, but promote as well as cancel dualism, since the first and foremost by the differences between opposition it sets up against Being is not them. "Difference" is as it were a "double", symmetrical and dialectically pure: not like two-faced thing: it contains difference as well the opposition of "black" to "white", or as non-difference (unification). "nothing" to "something". It is in fact this kind of sophisticated logic The importance of Non-Being as a crucial that makes John Cowper's treatment of a structuring aspect of the novels may be dimension that is "altogether different" gathered by considering the use of bones, (WoS, 239) meaningful and fertile. Being skeletons, skulls, and other objects repres- can engage dynamically with Non-Being, enting lines of supportive absence, features precisely because all things are perpetually of cogent negativity. In a fictional universe solicited by their negations and by negativity where the anthropocentric doctrine is ("Nothingness") in general. The world, frequently negated or displaced, man tends Being, in order to be must engage radically to foreground himself as a "flesh-covered with what it is not: with the margin of skeleton" (WeS, 135), as something whose absence and nothingness "around" it. very frame and support is conditioned by Without such an engagement, there would death rather than life. In Maiden Castle, this be no becoming, and the world would not centring of Non-Being and death manifests identify itself as it always does—that is, in itself chiefly through the delineation of the terms of desire. (Life wants; it is not just a sinister father-figure Uryen as a rex semi- dead "fact".) Thinking of his "mythology", mortuus, or corpse-god (MC, 154; 166). Far Wolf Solent asks Christie Malakite if she from being the emblem of a centred, or shares his own apprehension of belonging phallocentric culture, a world assured of the with some part of his soul "to a world alto- origin and end of its seeds, Uryen comes to gether different from this world" (ibid.). affirm a "sterile love" (240; 252). Desire Seeming to follow his line of thought, Chris- must be stirred up to a savage extreme—but tie answers that she has always accepted the then, when the optimal thrust of energy is at sense of "an enormous emptiness" round hand, the "grand trick" is to "keep it her (ibid.). In the heading for chapter 15 in sterile" (ibid.). At that moment, experienc- Wolf Solent, "Rounded with a Sleep", ed as a "pecking" that is "sweet as an Powys rehearses the kind of ontological ecstasy" (242; 253), Non-Being enters Being so as to create the hybrid sphere of "death- suggestion that Shakespeare toyed with: not in-life" (240; 252). That trick, giving to the simply that life is "surrounded" by non-life, man with the sterile life-seed" a "repulsive but that Being is encircled by Non-Being. To mortuary smell" (242; 253), becomes a know that existence is preceded and foll- "secret" in the bosom of the Welsh nation owed by nonexistence is just trivial inform- —something that is concealed from the in- ation; but to realize that the "two dark quisitive eye of Being and hidden in a horns of non-existence" {WoS, 426) are territory that itself naturally works for actively integral to our peculiar mode of absence, vanishing, and nothingness. being aware of ourselves as perpetual desire is to begin to free oneself from too-narrow Uryen's face has a tendency to actually conceptions of the human spirit. As soon as slip into Non-Being, "as if the man's linea- the main tension is perceived as one between ments were decomposing" (240; 253); and Being and Non-Being, rather than merely this odd fact is matched in Wolf Solent by a between existence and non-existence, the decomposition in the father-figure that is "extreme dualism" perceived by the Powys already completed. The head of the father, hero (through the momentary intuition of the face that laughs at Wolf during the Non-Being) can also be transmuted into a course of the numerous imaginative dia- refined affirmation of something "outside logues between father and son, is only a any 'dualism'" (286). Non-being can "hollow skull". Being and Non-Being 44 John Cowper Powys and Ontotheology reciprocate strangely as the presence of the hero's entire being seems to identify itself j face asserts itself from its zone of radical with an ancestral origin that itself is made of absence. The son is drawn into the general "bones", units of pallid absence: "His I dialectic of "is" and "is not": " 'Ho! Ho! father must hear him! Surely, between those j You worm of my folly,' laughed the hollow bones that had set themselves against his skull. 'I am alive still, though I am dead; and mother's bones, so that he might be born, you are dead, though you're alive' " (WoS, and his present living body, there must be 312). In such conversations, attention is something . . . some sort of link!" (WoS, \ drawn to the centrelessness of the father's 597) It seems to me, here, that "bones", as 1 skull, to the void that has replaced the brain things drawn into the circle of suggestion as seat of cogitation; and this attention to dominated throughout the novel by the j the void inside the skull is matched by an paternal "skull", identify Wolf's point of j equally strong emphasis on the emptiness origin from the outset as a crossing of neg- j outside it. As Wolf and Gerda fall asleep atives, a point where Non-Being leaves its after a turbulent day of nervous tension, cross and mark. Copulation, in this universe, they are simply "two skulls, lying side by if it is at all allowed as such, is strangely side", and such a receptacle for human negative. Indeed, the ecstatic moment of love thought cuts its outline into space as is at its summit of intensity explicitly ident- something surrounded by Non-Being, by ified as the secret partner of death: when "vast tracts of unknown country" (278). Wolf's "normal consciousness" returns Each skull is the centre of its own peculiar after an overpowering moment of intimacy landscape of imaginative projections; yet with Christie, the thought of their two indiv- the landscape, precisely by being subjective idual deaths comes' 'galloping'' like a''black and solitary, is not an empirical circle creat- horse'':' 'Moments as perfect as this required ing a reassuring domain in Being, but some- death as their inevitable counterpoise'' (440). thing essentially mysterious and unknown— If the foregrounding of death is one way mastered, provisionally, only by the imagin- of illuminating Non-Being as the innermost ation that fuels it. active formula of Being itself, the fore- grounding of the excremental aspects of life I am trying to suggest, then, how negativ- is another. The Powys hero has a tendency ity—shining forth through the skeletal cont- to affirm something "monstrously" absurd ours of death—in fact clarifies itself as the or "grotesquely non-human" in his inmost cosmic and ontological scaffolding of the nature (WoS, 277), and the attention given great Powys novel. Maiden Castle takes to this negative centre helps to decentre the death as its point of structural departure, individual as such. His centre is what most Dud approaching the mound of his unrav- of all negates him—what threatens his ished bride Mona in a visionary as well as human dignity and sane being. In Wey- quite physical fashion. "And what was she mouth Sands the mystic Sylvanus Cobbold like nowV' (MC, 19; 31) The italicized and his clown of a brother Jerry in different words draw our attention to the decompos- ways work toward the enjoyment of a ition that we have already identified in "mystical ecstasy" in which the leftovers Uryen's face: a dissolution that works phys- and marginal trivia of existence become ically on physiognomy and flesh, but also on strangely significant: "old withered horse- "identity" as such. Indeed, we are made to droppings", "wisps of dirty straw", and so feel that humans, already, before any tres- forth (WeS, 221). Jerry Cobbold can "get passing into spiritual and biological decay, an ecstasy" from "the excremental under- are inscribed in terms of death/negativity. tides of existence" (ibid.), and his brother They emerge out of it, as crocodiles out of Sylvanus promotes the tail-end of his own water or birds out of eggs. As Wolf's gazing name to the level of a cosmic clue. In his into the mound of death parallels Dud's efforts to disappear completely as an gazing into the erased features of Mona, the John Cowper Powys and Ontotheology 45 empirical centre of human self-conscious- gical types of thought that stressed Non- ness, he throws himself recklessly into all the Being and absence as integral to total reality. objects of the natural world surrounding Indeed, negativity is not only integral to the him, retaining for himself at first only the universe, but the mainspring of its coherent epithet "Caput" (381). As the centre of an complexity. absolute decentring, or as the void and The ideas above, to be sure, are expressed decentring itself, Sylvanus "never call[s] by a single character, and Dud's reluctance himself T or 'me'" as he addresses the to swallow all of his father's notions Absolute (ibid.)- Yet even the "Caput" that suggests that Uryen is no simple mouthpiece functions as substitute is somehow too for Powys. Yet thoughts similar to these are logocentric, too suggestive of a centered scattered throughout the novels and over an Cogito dwelling in the stable nucleus of entire spectrum of characters—giving to the Being and being-human. Hence "Anus" is total oeuvre precisely a sense that its author added as a ritualistically important word subscribes to an ontology where Non-Being that will ensure the dislocation of the centre plays a vital part. Moreover, this general and the promotion of the absolute margin fascination with what is absent and averted (381-82). "Sylvanus" becomes "Caput- is related to the kind of psychological intuit- anus": an entity, if you will, with head and ion that I have already discussed as a sense of tail, but no middle. significant movement "outside ordinary experience" (WeS, 243). Because crucial meaning is naturally averted, absent, and VI concealed (like the other side of the moon), The "anus", as exit and farther side of man, some extraordinary effort of mind and spirit belongs to an entire structure of images in is needed in order to make contact with it. For Powys, it does not seem likely that any which John Cowper Powys promotes the ordinary movement (still inside the reassur- importance of what is averted: what is ing citadel of Being) is going to bring the turned away from the centre and away from vital Outside into view; hence he tends to the inside. (In this way, Being, as that which focus absurd, unusual, perverse, and turns into itself to inwardly establish its uncanny events as "triggers" that somehow ownmost substance, is subverted, and Non- may provisionally disclose the absolute Being is affirmed.) Dud No-man takes otherness of the wondrous other. When Peg special pleasure in Wizzie Ravelston's figure Frampton observes the curious gestures that "when her back [is] turned" {MC, 129; Sylvanus Cobbold makes, she associates 141), and when Uryen tries to explain his their odd force with the Holy Ghost. But this cosmology and ontology to Dud, this idea of association in no way takes place inside the ascendancy of the rear over the front (of Being, or as something confirming Being/ absence over presence) is developed into a God/Spirit/Ghost. On the contrary, the comprehensive ideology. thought is (outwardly) so monstrous in its '[B]ut lad, you can't face life "four- associative recklessness that it may be square." That's where you make your viewed as a negation of Being/God. The mistake, and so many others. The back side of "Absolute" that is joyously affirmed has your square turns away from life. Life never nothing whatsoever to do with what we sees it. It cannot see life. It's like the other side normally conceive of as godhead or of the moon! And yet nobody has ever Absolute: doubted that there is another side to the moon.' (MC, 221; 233) She even went so far—and it was the reverse of blasphemy in her—to mix up the swaying This passage is absolutely crucial, for it of those horizontal fingers from the man's proves beyond the faintest shadow of doubt bent wrists with her childish ideas of the Holy that John Cowper was familiar with ontolo- Ghost. The grotesqueness of the action was 46 John Cowper Powys and Ontotheology j what led her to do this. It seemed to contain a strides from world to world creating new j rebuke, a retort, a defiance, a challenge to things out of nothing! . . . And it will break I Evil, from an armoury of the perverse, the through.' {MC, 453-56; 467-68) j weird, the monstrous, the half-mad; and this —with her loathing of conventional religion —was precisely her own private notion of VII how the Absolute should go to work, when it broke out. (We5, 332-33) Because metaphysics since Plato has taken Being/God for granted as the monolithic centre and ground of reality, John Cowper The last unit here—"broke out"—paral- Powys's consistent defiance and displace- lels the piercing that Uryen associates with ment of the ontotheological Block Universe negated erotic fulfilment in Maiden Castle. can be viewed as sharing certain crucial The act of "breaking through" (MC, 236; intellectual properties with the famous 248) is an ontological move. It can be felt by modern solicitations of Being/metaphysics an entire culture, if that entire culture is —the works of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and paradigmatically pushed from the centre, Derrida. Most recently, and most dramat- thrust into the absolute margin of existence. ically, Derrida has of course challenged the As we can see from the following lines in idea that any metaphysical concept can have Maiden Castle, the moment when the spirit an absolutely fixed and stable identity. comes to "break through" (break through Nothing is in the final analysis absolutely Being out into Non-Being) is a moment of certain and static, since all the units of truly ecstatic desire: of desire taken to an reality are thrown into the infinite' 'play'' of extreme pitch, where it literally stands-out the world. In the risk and play of Becoming, straight into the Other. All the traditional the solid landmarks of Being are caused to units of Being are here negated: custom, float and migrate. Hence, as soon as he causation, morality, comfort, and so forth. himself approaches the vanity of creating a In Nietzschean fashion, moreover, the ec- new philosophical category of his own, Der- static act implies creation—a creating of rida quickly punctures its possible essence. ! things absolutely new, and a creating that Each new idea or thought must be prevented j takes place outside Being, in the empty from becoming a crystallization. Fluid j margin where novelty still has not been rather than solid, philosophical concepts j thought, conceived, or forseen ("out of must exhibit consciousness of their provis- j nothing"). Non-Being is the locus of the ional nature. | ecstatically new: If we look at the rich philosophical com- j 'Hiraeth is our word for it—no other mentary provided by the narrator and by the j tongue on earth has a word like that!— . . . Powys heroes, we can see that John Cowper j Desire, but not ordinary desire. Desire grown Powys works along very similar lines. Like j beside itself! Desire driven against custom, Derrida, he is deeply fascinated by the j driven against habit, driven against the logical and imaginative appeal in the great j cowardice of mankind ... [It is] the power of clue-words of Western metaphysics; but like j the Underworld that our old Bards worship- Derrida, he also uses the reverberatory | ped, though it was always defeated... [It is] suggestiveness of these selfsame clue-words j the Power our race adored when they built in order to dislodge them from fixed Avebury and Maiden Castle and Stonehenge positions in frozen philosophical and Caer Drwyn, when there were no wars, no "systems". vivisection, no money, no ten-thousand- times accursed nations] [It has always] defied We can observe this strategy with great morality, custom, convention, usage, clarity in the fourteenth and sixteenth comfort, and all the wise and prudent of the chapters of Wolf Solent—a novel where the world ... It moves from the impossible to the hero expresses thoughts that are strikingly impossible. It abolishes cause and effect. It similar to ideas forwarded by John Cowper John Cowper Powys and Ontotheology 47 in his quasi-philosophical works. When margin that philosophical Meaning leaves Christie Malakite fails to exactly grasp why on its outside. As I have already suggested, Wolf prefers the word "medieval" to "plat- love becomes a pivotal unit in this conflict onic", Wolf enters upon a philosophical between centre/meaning and margin/play, disquisition that very accurately identifies since love can be a centralising and approp- John Cowper's own general attitude riating matrix (promoting Being) as well as towards metaphysical clue-words. What is an ecstatic and decentralising release (prom- being suggested is not that the sceptic is a oting Non-Being). Wolf's joyful release into philosophical charlatan, somebody who "[rloads and lanes", away from woman as with much shallowness makes philosophical matrix ("that maternal hypnosis", 305) is ideas mean anything he happens to want precisely a release from the womb of Being them to mean; rather, the exact metaphys- into the nomadic and eccentric sphere of ical notion is taken as that which it is, and fluid motion. This nomadic dimension in then this central identity of its significance is John Cowper, expressing itself in his deliberately decentred. The "softening" enormous willingness to take long walks and that occurs here is not simply the blurring of to migrate across the vast surfaces of contin- a sharp focus, a loss of intellectual concen- ents and oceans, can perhaps itself be posit- tration—but on the contrary a process of ed as an antimetaphysical mode of being. inward illumination that causes the John Cowper "wrote Wolf Solent travelling abstractly pointlike idea to expand and glow through all the states of the United States into the luminous contours of what has except two" (WoS, vii); and since this formed its general planetary and cultural perpetually nomadic state of being is del- context. (Notice, in what follows, how iberately associated (in the novel) with a Powys in Derridean fashion displaces the decentred apprehension of the philosophic- centre—"immediate meaning"—in order al "phrases" of "Leibnitz and Hegel" to privilege the "margin".) (340), a term such as Leibnitz's famous "monad" could be replaced by what for 'Medieval, Wolf?' protested Christie. John Cowper would be a "nomad"—a 'Don't be cross with me. I know I'm metaphysical notion that, unlike the frozen absurd. I suppose I'm more of a slave to phil- "monad", is not an abstraction lacking osophicalphrases than anyone in the whole of extension in space, but on the contrary England! I love the sound of them. They have something... a sort of magic... I don't know something that includes space and spacing in what . . . that makes life rich and exciting to its prime condition of possibility. me.' The monad remains what it "is". It 'Oh, I know what you mean, Wolf!' cried belongs to Being. But a "nomad" does Christie. 'That's why I've loved reading those precisely the opposite. It moves. And it books in our shop . . . especially Leibnitz and Hegel. I've never been able to follow their real moves away. We can study this nomadic meaning, I suppose; but all the same it's been character of Powys's nonconcepts in Wolf a great satisfaction to me to read them.' Solent's discussion of the expression "im- 'I don't think it's pedantry or priggishness mortal souls". This idea, far from being an in either of us,' Wolf continued. 'I think we're ontotheological, platonic notion (which is thrilled by the weight of history that lies its normal force of suggestion), for Powys behind each one of these phrases. It isn't just becomes a nomadic entity that walks the word itself, or just its immediate meaning. "away". The nomad, or originally restless It's a long, trailing margin of human sens- idea, itself walks "away over the fields": ations, life by life, century by century, that gives us this peculiar thrill.' {WoS, 340-41) Certain human expressions, meaning one thing to the philosopher and quite another The main tension, here, runs between the thing to the populace, were always fascinating central and the marginal—between what has to Wolf. His mind began to dwell now upon an "immediate meaning" and what is in the the actual syllables Of this phrase, 'immortal 48 John Cowper Powys and Ontotheology souls', until by a familiar transformation Because the "nomad" (as I am defining those formidable sounds took on a shadow it) is the perpetually active erasure of its own personality of their own—took on the shape, fixed being (of any permanent "home" that in fact, of Christie Malakite—and in that it could have), it can never become an onto- shape went wavering away over the fields like a thin spiral cloud (293). theologically operative category. It can never be a simple and straightforward The essential suggestion in this passage is affirmation of God (of Being). Indeed, the notion that truth, rather than being a ' 'God" is just about the only word/idea that presence and a centre, is something furtively never could be a "nomad": experienced at the outer edge of presence: in the twilight zone where presence, already, is As he moved slowly along now between the sculptured entrance to the school-house and feeling the impact of absence. Thus the the little low-roofed shop where the straw- "nomad"—being neither an idea nor a sens- hatted boys of the School bought their ation, but being still something that can be confectionery, it occurred to him as curiously thought and felt—emerges in terms of significant that the syllable 'God', so talis- vanishing, appears in terms of disappearing. manic to most people, had never, from his What he experiences is not "confined" to childhood, possessed the faintest magic for any strictly present locus. "It was much him! 'It must be,' he thought, as, passing more as if he were enabled to enter, by a under a carved archway, he came bolt up on lucky psychic sensitiveness, into some con- the old monastic conduit, 'that anything suggestive of metaphysical unity is distasteful tinuous stream of human awareness— to me!'(293-94) awareness of a beauty in the world that travelled lightly from place to place, This viewpoint does not leave us in stopping here and stopping there, like a bird atheism; it places us in a creation where what of passage, but never valued as its true worth is divine freely exceeds the limits of mere until it had vanished away" (292, my italics). divinity.

NOTES 'Editions used: Maiden Castle, London: Cassell, 3The godhead, pushed to the margin and horizon 1937; Macdonald, 1966 (& Pan/Picador 1979); by this erotic "side-steering", seems to intervene in Weymouth Sands, London: Macdonald, 1963 (& the shape of the revolving ray from the Portland Bill Pan/Picador, 1980); Wolf Solent, London: Light-house. The Absolute, like a lover now reduced Macdonald, 1961. to a Peeping Tom, can only intermittently "thrust" its 2The difference between Hegelian and Derridean great luminous "index finger" into the "gulfs of thinking is not, as many of Derrida's "followers" Nothingness" (WeS, 382). tend to think, a dialectical opposition. Derrida's 4 Derrida conceives ontotheology as "phallocen- thought can instead be seen as an' 'amendment" to the tric", so that the "sex" of logocentrism is masculine. Hegelian corpus—as a Hegelianism that suddenly Being is paternal, patriarchal, and grandfatherly. moves in a new direction when the final turn of the John Cowper, by contrast, frequently associates the "dialectic" is about to be completed. Because of this father-figure with gestures that displace and oust the secret affinity between Hegel and Derrida, the polar- logocentric rationale. It is difficult to see how the ization of the two philosophers in this essay must be Derridean paradigm could finally be more than an viewed as a provisional schematization for the sake of inverted form of sexism. A critique of ontotheology argumentative illustration rather than as a simple can surely "take off" from man as well as woman. propositional truth. Ben Jones

John Cowper Powys in New Mexico

John Cowper Powys did not stay very long recover. Powys had known Ficke since 1914, in New Mexico. Although he was there in the through his lecturing in the Midwest and his 1920s when its attractiveness to artists and involvement in Maurice Browne's theatre writers was at a high point, he seems not to productions in Chicago. He writes about have had any aspirations either to set up or Ficke in Autobiography and An English- join a community there. He was still trav- man Upstate. Ficke was one of Powys's elling. But in the summer of 1927 he did visit special American friends, and it was the his close American friends, Arthur David- connection with Ficke that facilitated the son Ficke and Gladys Ficke, in Santa Fe. It move to Phudd Bottom. He played a part in was an experience that was important to Powys's choice to settle near Hillsdale: he him, to which he turned in his recollections, and Gladys lived nearby, and Edna St. and which reveals to us some significant ele- Vincent Millay and Gerald Boissevain lived ments of his character. The record of his in the area. He financed the purchase of three-day visit to the Fickes sheds light on Phudd Bottom for Powys (who quickly John Cowper's closeness to and, paradox- repaid the loan from the earnings from Wolf ically, distance from American life. It Solent). Ficke aspired to poetry, Gladys to connects with other events in his life in the painting. The area had attracted artists and period of the writing of Wolf Solent, with writers, and it was, perhaps, a counter-part his relation with Phyllis Playter, and with to the more idyllic New Mexico. When the decision was made to return to Wales, Ficke decisions he was taking about the develop- 2 ment of his commitment to writing fiction. was the first to know. Powys was deeply Arthur Davidson Ficke was throughout this moved by Ficke's suffering and death from period—from the mid-1920s to 1934 when cancer of the throat in 1945. The fullness of the relation to Ficke remains to be explored. John and Phyllis returned to Britain—very In July 1927 Powys was lecturing in East close to being a confidant to John. The New Las Vegas, New Mexico. He learned that Mexico interlude has been preserved for us Arthur and Gladys were living in Santa Fe. in letters, in an extremely interesting type- On 18 July 1927, Powys wrote to Ficke, script commentary—a perceptive character suggesting a visit: study—by Gladys Ficke, and in three engag- ing photographs. I would like here to present portions from the relevant letters Well! it certainly will be a shame if we can't and from the commentary by Gladys Ficke, get a glimpse of each other being so near— and to offer some comments on the photo- they tell me about 75 miles apart only—wc I 1 suppose is nothing over here—tho' in England graphs. The overall scene is a mixture of or in Germany I suppose it wd mean that never idyll, comedy, and peculiarity, and when it wd we meet! Just now with my lectures starting is placed in the large frame of Powys's and at this Chautauqua next Thursday, I don't feel the Fickes' lives, it carries, as comedy always much heart for adventure or even pleasure. does, some of the weight of tragic experience. My health is a bit shaky at the moment and Like Llewelyn, Arthur Davidson Ficke these lectures seem likely as they loom up to suffered from tuberculosis, and in 1927 he absorb most of my strength. But as time goes was in New Mexico to rest, and, he hoped, to on—for I do not leave here till August 17th— 50 John Cowper Powys in Mexico I hope to have gathered from this good air— Arthur's description of him seemed to me a tho' its very hot today—sufficient spirit to bit exaggerated: But I found that one could make an effort to get over to see you. See you I hardly exaggerate John Cowper Powys who want to so much. What ancient memories was himself his own superlative.4 revive!... Aye! but it seems I am your debtor every way, Ficke my dear friend, for what you After some discussion of a poem that Ficke wrote about Ducdame caused me the only had sent to Powys and to Hal [Witter] really overpowering thrill I got out of that Bynner, Gladys gets down to the visit itself: book. I can recall the bathroom—tho' not the City—where I opened that letter. I don't Like everyone else, I was amazed when I suppose anyone ever got such pleasure from met this renouned J. C. P.—gaunt and grin- praise as I did then. I daresay I may be destined ning wide with an odd pulling down of the ' to live on that praise—"the perfect witness of long upper lip before it addmitted the grin, a all-judging Jove"—to the last—but who can stooped shabbily clothed figure with grizzled tell? It may be that the novel I've now been curls and slender bony hands. He stared into writing for I've forgotten how long will get the my eyes as if he meant to fathom me to the same sort of letter. deepest before he trusted himself to my company; and then he broke into ejaculations of utmost delight in seeing Arthur again and The letter ends with some bits of news and a meeting "his lady". Now the talk started and request for an early reply. The "novel I've never stopped during our waking hours for been writing" is certainly Wolf Solent, two and a half days, largely literary talk and much of which had been completed by 1925 over my head in good part. Jack Powys's con- (1,150 manuscript pages by 3 December).3 versation was as full of quotations and allus- Ficke's reply was prompt, and on 21 July ions as were his letters; his hands clutching or Powys wrote again to set out details for the gesturing with an awkward grace of their own and his animated mobile face made one think visit. They arrange to meet on the 28th, and of his punctuation full of exclamation marks, Powys will stay until the 30th (Thursday, underlinings, dots, dashes and parentheses. Friday, Saturday). Ficke drove a car, which He did not drink and hardly ate, no wonder he amazed Powys, who said that Ficke was the was a skeleton—but what an enchanting one! only poet he had ever met who was the least Poor fellow, he put up with a good deal and it bit mechanical. probably lost him more weight. Arthur was We are fortunate to have a detailed record by this time a thoroughgoing nudist, disallow- of the visit set down by Gladys Ficke in her ing nudist colonies. We took Jack up the biographical record of her husband. This canyon for a picnic luncheon, and stopping beside a stream Arthur was all for a swim. typescript text is in the Beinecke Rare Book Jack would not go in. "Go along," he said, and Manuscript Library at Yale. It is a "you two, nymph and fawn, you go in and poignant testimony of her devotion to him, disport yourselves. I'll sit in the reeds like a and it is, in its way, a powerful statement of peeping Tom and watch the frisking." We loss as it traces auspicious beginnings, un- had no idea that a nude person was more realized hopes, and a final burden of phys- horrifying to his eyes than a dead bird. He ical suffering. It gives us a sense of what endured it and grinned like a monkey, making "loss" was for the Lost Generation, and it is little deceitful cries of delight. For my part, I a rich primary source for cultural study of was never embarrassed by nudity; and I doubt the period, resonating as it does with the if anyone can draw hundreds of naked connections to Fitzgerald and Hemingway, figures, as I had, and retain any prudish two other Midwestern Americans who tried concerne about the matter. Long afterward, Jack told Arthur that had I not been so slim as to break away (Ficke's family came from a boy with hardly any revolting "female- Davenport, Iowa, where the father was a ness", he would have died of anguish. We prominent lawyer). But here we are more being clothed again he not having died, we immediately concerned with Gladys Ficke's climbed half way up the great slope of the comments on John Cowper Powys: canyon spiked with enormously tall pines; John Cowper Powys in Mexico 51 and there he nibbled at a hard boiled egg while photographs & and was so proud of them & talking to Arthur of Greek plays. I wonder if enchanted to have them—what a Water- he fancied Venus in a Mother Hubbard, nymph—what a Lorelie—Gladys does look! showing an ankle, perhaps. He allowed I am glad I've got them." In this letter himself to admire fine ankles. I took a Powys provides his next address: c/o photograph of him and Arthur lying beside the picnic baskets, monkey and suave-looking Franklin Playter, Route 4, Galena, Kansas. bandit. . . From there, on 26 August, he wrote his final I drove my two cavaliers back to Canyon letter in this series, thanking them for a Road. In his bread-and-butter letter Jack bottle of home-made wine and for some spoke certain untruths, but he'd forgiven us whisky for his flask (this was the period of the shock we had subjected him to . . . Abolition in the U.S.A.). He praised Arthur's poem "Christ in China" and The exact "untruths" of Jack's advised him not to desert his "graver muse" "bread-and-butter letter" (dated 3 August ("Christ in China" is a grave poem). 1927 from East Las Vegas) are probably Powys's not infrequent exaggerations. The By 1929 Powys had made his decision to live near Ficke in Upstate New York.5 This letter has its excesses, but the experience had was not an escape, however, since it was a been an idyllic one for Powys, and he was career decision: to end his lecturing and not one to let a rapturous moment go devote his time to writing. The monetary unnoticed: success of Wolf Solent seemed to promise Aye! but you two were so lovely to me—I some possibility of financial security, but in can't think how you are so good—being a 1929 and 1930 hopes for financial security poet and such an Oread and horse-lover—for were short-lived. We can assume that the men who are geniuses and girls who are "long New Mexico idyll of 1927 did have some & lovely" don't often get this Homeric mag- nanimity and goodness as of "an empler influence on Powys's decision to create a ether & diviner air" than our selfish shallow similar idyllic life—idyllic in the artist's world. sense: a place in which to create, in close I wish I could put down in rhyme or at least company with kindred spirits—in the metre something of what I feel about you two wooded hills near Hillsdale, New York. The & how uncommon kind you were to me & Fickes were kindred spirits. evidently are to many a battered wayfarer. The photographs have "documentary" Aye! how happy I was with you two & how interest: they record an event, they become soothed my nerves were. For a morose part of Gladys's and Powys's memory and malicious secretive bugger like myself it was like being fallen into an antique island of the are written about in subsequent texts, just as blest to consort with you. How enchanting the event itself is, and they contribute to the you both did look shadowed by trees & grass Powys "archive". They also provide the and water one so white and one so brown and opportunity for some interpretive commen- both so dear to a touchy hermit!.. .God! lam tary. There is a wonderful contrast between more than ever a devotee of your blond the flatness and hardness of the adobe wall unconquerable race. You Mr. Fausts will and the heavily attired figure of Powys, with always have some special link with the earth- his conspicuous watch chain, seated in a spirit as well as some secret way of calling up chair that seems to block him into a definite young daughters of the antique world for space. It provides a sense of a composed your delight & solace . . . which will remain "being-out-of-place", a composed awk- the riddle to latin & celt. wardness, the "awkward grace" which Powys wrote again on 16 August, the day Gladys noted about this "shabbily clothed before he left for the East, to say a "good- figure". The heat-baked adobe wall con- bye and a 'so long' till we meet again ..." He trasts pointedly with the residue of formality also acknowledges receipt of the photo- in Powys's suit and tie. It is strikingly similar graphs: "Aye! but I did so admire those to photographs of D. H. Lawrence in his 52 John Cowper Powys in Mexico

Powys him.tclf who took the picture. The picture is actually very well composed. Arthur and Gladys's arms make a circle, and there is something of a circular motion to the New Mexico years, particularly one from water. Gladys's body is turned in an almost 1922, with Lawrence standing against an classical pose, revealing yet discreet. adobe wall, a "shabbily clothed figure", preserving some residue of Englishness, and definitely out of place. Powys does manage a smile, although his expression does not seem incompatible with the recurrence of his dyspepsia which he records in the letters of the period. Powys is wearing suit and tie again in the "picnic-basket" scene. Here the two men are described by Gladys as ' 'monkey'' (John Cowper, we assume) and "suave-looking bandit". Wherever he was, Powys was not about to sacrifice his protective suit. It seems as if he were particularly concerned to keep his clothes on against the imminent threat of nudity which was so casual a scene for Arthur and Gladys. If the repast (hard- boiled eggs) seems something less than Dionysian, there is something of at least "fun" in the third photograph, the nude- bathing scene. We must assume that it was John Cowper Powys in Mexico 53 Powys's penchant for "looking" (Gladys Gladys, too, fits into place in Powys's had noted how he " stared'' at her when they "mythology": nymph, boyish body, first met) provides continuity to his narra- ankles, classic design. She takes her place tives, and he might even have become a good among those "long and lovely" girls who photographer. Powys was said by Gladys to populate Powys's fiction. Yet, it is her per- have said: "I'll sit in the reeds like a peeping ceptive commentary that brings the photo- Tom and watch the frisking." The bathing graphs and the scene itself to life. She is the scene does give us some of the basic conven- one who sees into the complexity of Powys's tions of photographic composition, the character. Her free spirit, and Arthur's triangle (two points conspicuously related to (stolidly Germanic, but still a nudist), rep- a third point—that is, Arthur gazing at resented a way of life that remained apart Gladys gazing at John Cowper who, camera from Powys's own unsettled, complex, in hand, gazes at Arthur and Gladys), and obsessively sexual world. If, however, she is the circle (what I have already noted as the one of those "looked at", she provides, in circular motions of the bodies and the turn, a commentary, a comedy, that places water). and, for awhile, keeps Powys in an actual, Ficke did represent for Powys a free and even stable, world. Perhaps this was spirit, and Gladys's presence seemed to what Powys found in his New Mexico idyll: confirm Ficke's special power. Powys notes an actual, if momentary, connection to a on several occasions the physical power of world unencumbered by lectures, perform- Ficke, his affiliation to the "blond ances, difficult schedules, bad food, finan- unconquerable race". But Ficke had power cial anxiety and an uneasy sexuality. It was of position as well: he moved easily in the model for what became the next import- important circles, his Harvard degree gave ant stage in his development, his move, with him credentials, he had established expertise Phyllis Playter, to Upstate New York, to as a collector and commentator on Oriental give up lecturing and turn his energies com- art, his financial situation seemed secure, pletely towards writing. and he showed promise as a writer of neatly Powys recalled the New Mexico adven- turned poems. Powys gave him advice about ture in a letter to Ficke written from Corwen his writing, not always affirmative advice, in March of 1940, addressed to ' 'Darling old but he did encourage him to pursue success Arthur of the Samurai". Various recollect- as a writer. This success Ficke did not ions of earlier days move towards the achieve, although it is possible that his work memory of Sante Fe: will someday be re-examined. If he seemed to be a free spirit, he was nevertheless Well we have known each other a great stricken by sickness, and, I think, by number of years! How long ago it seems now when you first showed me the Mississippi! melancholy, which was unrelieved until his And how I did enjoy those visits and rub my death in 1945. Powys wanted advice and hands together with pride & happiness when sought encouragement in return, but Ficke you used to put me into the sleeper for was too stolid to take to Glastonbury and he Chicago & I wd have a cigarette in the disliked Morwyn intensely (which, of Smoking Room before going to bed thinking course, was consistent with the general of you & of the way you'd blown up my Self- response to that book). He had, however, Esteem till it was airy enough to cross the given support to Powys's earlier fiction. We State-Boundaries of more than Iowa and have already noted Powys's gratitude for his Illinois—ready to whirl along like one of the comments on Ducdame, and even earlier Tyres of that Car that astonished me so! And Powys thanked him for his response to then what a moment when I found you Rodmoor. "I can't tell you, my dear, how waiting me in that Las Vegas Dining Room when they made you put on an Alpaca Jacket your letter about Rodmoor recovered 6 —and how entrancing to my unpardonable me." feelings was it to see you and Gladys swim- 54 John Cowper Powys in Mexico ming in that rock-stream at Sante Fe! With "mythology", transformed his actual world whatever it is that in the Heart of a Monster into fantasy, imposed itself upon actual like me represents Human Love I am your experience, dangerously, requiring acquain- John-Descript tances, to play out his interior life. I do not Non-Descript think we can escape this tendency towards New Mexico does not, I believe, enter dir- shaping, dominating, the other that marks ectly into Powys's fiction, nor can we make so strongly Powys's writing and his life, and out counter-parts for either Arthur or Gladys that defines the motives of so many of his Ficke, both of whom, as I have tried to show, central characters. The brief interlude in played important roles in his actual life. We New Mexico—marked out for us in letters, know so little about how this supposedly pictures, and inscribed memories—has that "biographical" and "autobiographical" kind of centrifugal movement (we recall the writer transformed characters from his moving water in the "rock stream" that so experience into characters in his fiction. It characterizes Powys's life and writing, a may be that it worked the other way around: consciousness of centrality that seems his fictional world, like Wolf Solent's determined to fall away.

NOTES

1 The letters cited here from John Cowper Powys to domiciled (if not domestic) stability are counter- Arthur Davidson Ficke are from the Beinecke Rare pointed in the letters to Llewelyn in this period. JCP's Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. gratitude for Ficke's praise of Ducdame is also men- Dates are noted in the text. The typescript biography tioned in the letters to Llewelyn (18 February 1925, of Arthur Davidson Ficke by his wife, Gladys Ficke, is Vol. II, p. 5). also located there. The three photographs are in the Ficke's letter to Powys on Ducdame, dated 9 Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, February 1925, should have thrilled him: "What an University of Michigan Library. Michigan has a extraordinary book! A great achievement!—by far, collection of Maurice Browne's papers. Browne, the your best book so far,—and, unless I am crazy, one of theatre director and producer, was friend both to the most thrilling and richly poetical novels in the Ficke and Powys. The photographs are with the Ficke language." Ficke's comments on Ducdame in the material in the Browne collection, and I think they got three page letter are detailed. there in this way: John Cowper had received the 4 From Gladys Ficke's unpublished biography of photographs from Ficke, and after Ficke died in 1945 her husband, pp. 693-696. The typescript is made up Powys sent them to Maurice Browne who had begun of her commentary on her own and her husband's life collecting Ficke's letters for publication. The project along with extensive quotation from correspondence. was dropped, and after Browne's death, his papers I have left uncorrected her idiosyncratic spelling: were left to the University of Michigan, and material "renouned", "addmitted", "concerne". he had collected on Ficke was deposited there at that 5 In August 1928, he and Phyllis were still searching time. Late note: the Editor has informed me of at least for a place. They had an offer to settle on Dreiser's one other photograph from this occasion. Its "estate", but it was near a lake and Phyllis did not like inclusion would add to, and certainly not controvert, lakes (Letters to His Brother Llewelyn, II, p. 81). In my discussion here. this letter he also says: "But the future for all of us is 2 JCP to ADF, 27 December 1938: "You were the uncertain—as you say, one step enough for me..." In very first perambulatory upright anthropoid skeleton a letter dated 22 January 1929, Powys asks Ficke into whose ear—in that wood near your Pleasance—I about the possibility of finding a "very small little breathed my resolution to go to Wales & write the house in your district." On 25 April 1929, an agree- greatest Historical Novel since Sir Walter Scott about ment had been made to buy the "small farm opposite Owen Glendower." Albert Krick's place" at Harlemville, the price to be ' John Cowper Powys, Letters to His Brother $2,300.00. By 7 May 1929 the title was closed, and by Llewelyn, ed. Malcolm Elwin, London: Village Press, 29 May Powys was sending cheques to Ficke (the first 1975, Vol. II (1925-1939), p. 26. The unsettled years for $300.00). But Powys asks that, since letters seem to which preceded the move to Phudd Bottom in 1929 have been shared by the family, a code name be used to were the years during which Wolf Solent was written: refer to the purchase of the house. On 12 November the writing of the novel and the search for some 1929, Powys told Ficke that "I am beginning ... my John Cowper Powys in Mexico 55 rebellion against my present manager [Keedrick]." ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Lecturing was coming to an end, and a new life devoted to writing had begun. I wish to thank Donald Gallup, Literary Executor 6JCP to ADF, from "12 W 12", or 12 West 12th for Mrs Ficke, for permission to use the material at Street, in New York City, undated, but probably 24 The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, November 1916 (from the envelope): "I can't tell you, Yale University; also, the Department of Rare Books my dear, how your letter, about Rodmoor recovered and Special Collections, University of Michigan me." Library, for their assistance with the photographs and with Powys/Ficke material in their collection of the Van Volkenburg-Browne papers; also Laurence Poll- inger Ltd., for permission to use the unpublished correspondence of John Cowper Powys.

THE POWYS SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA FOURTH ANNUAL CONFERENCE "AT THE END OF MODERNISM"

TO BE HELD AT

CARLETON UNIVERSITY, OTTAWA, CANADA

3 TO 5 JUNE 1988

First Announcement and Call for Papers

Papers, not to exceed fifteen pages (double spaced), should be sent to the address below by 1 MARCH 1988. Papers should focus on the writings of John Cowper Powys, T. F. Powys, Llewelyn Powys, or on writers and thinkers closely related to their work. Suggested general topics, as they relate to Powys texts, might include:

Modernist Autobiographical Writing, Myths of Sexual Difference, Travel and Exile as a Condition of Modernism, Modernism and the Novel of Ideas, Historical Fictions in the Modernist Period, The Essay as a Genre in Modernism, Modernist Critical Reception and the Powyses.

INQUIRIES AND PAPERS SHOULD BE SENT TO:

Ben Jones, Department of English Carleton University Colonel By Drive Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1S 5B6 Patricia Vaughan Dawson

Notes on Etchings and Sculpture suggested by Scenes from J. C. Powys's Porius

These sculptures and etchings follow those based I have chosen eight images which depict part- on The Brazen Head, but the projects differ as icular aspects of the characters and some do the books. dramatic moments described in the text, and The Brazen Head sculpture is a rocky lands- produced five etchings and three sculptures. cape where seven groups of figures act out scenes that reflect the episodic nature of the story. The The Etchings seven etchings have a similarity to playing cards, The Etchings are all printed in black from irreg- with their unity of size and colour and an ular shaped plates to evoke the colour, form and emphasis on symbolic shapes. (See The Powys texture of stone. The mood of each scene is Review, Number 4). expressed by the degree of contrast in tones and The narrative of Porius presents one with a the defining of the images. vast emotional and philosophic panorama, sens- /. The Cave of Mithras itively related to the landscape, the times of day, Rhun with his hound shows Porius his Mithraic and the time of the year, October. cave.

i. © Patricia V. Dawson. (Sculpture photography by Catherine Dawson) Etchings and Sculptures 57 II. Myrddin Wyllt in the Forest Myrddin, in the clothes of a rough herdsman of the south, is in the forest at twilight in a mist. His presence has attracted birds and animals and he holds a fawn in his arms.

III. The Three Aunties in their Prime This is a personal view of The Three Aunties as they might have been when younger, many years before the book opens. They stand in a wood and represent the Celtic Triple Goddess.

IV. The Milk Offering Although Myrddin Wyllt wears his courtier's cloak, he acts out a bucolic scene. It is night time and he has brought a black cow into a lamplit tent where are Gwendydd, his sister, and Nineue, his mistress. Gwendydd stands by the cow's head as Myrddin Wyllt milks, sitting on a three-legged stool.

IV.

V. The Plunge of the Giant Gawr Holding the Body of Creiddylad The giant plunges with the dead body of his daughter, Creiddylad, into a bottomless tarn in a cleft in the rocks. She died while intercepting a blow which her father had aimed at Porius. The giant's anger had been aroused by the sight of Porius making love to Creiddylad.

III. Etchings and Sculptures The Sculptures The Sculptures are made of paper and paste and are painted in muted colours.

1. The Three Aunties Mourn Round the Body ofMorvran This incident is described as having taken place at the Gaer before the story begins. After I had finished the sculpture, I was told that it is more fully described in the uncut version of Porius. The mutilated body of Morvran lies on the hollow stone of sacrifice and is surrounded by his three great aunts, Yssylt, Erddud and Tonwen. In each is shown a different aspect of a mourn- ing woman. Yssylt represents the priestess as she cries out \ to the gods of her Druidic beliefs. Erddud represents the mother. She protects his head with her arms and her posture suggests 1 his birth in reverse. We are told in the text that j the birthstone stands nearby. Tonwen's kneeling body is bowed with grief and given over entirely to her feelings. Etchings and Sculptures 59

2. Morfydd Comforts Rhun Morfydd has discovered Rhun weeping in the chapel at the Gaer. He has broken his spear in a fight and has been spurned by Gwendydd, Myrddin Wyllt's sister whom he loves. Morfydd has pulled his head onto her shoulder to comfort him. 3. Myrddin Wyllt Transforms the Owl This conjuring trick with which Myrddin Wyllt confronts Minnawc Gorsant, the Christian priest, forms one of the most dramatic scenes in the book. Myrddin Wyllt has caught an owl that has been seen fluttering round his head, has drawn it under his cloak, and, while it was hidden, trans- formed it into a naked girl. The story of Bloden- wedd has been reversed. The cloak billows out in a pregnant way. As she emerges from its folds, the girl's skin, colouring and features suggest the texture and colouring of a barn owl. Reviews

The Kingfisher's Wing, There are hazards attendant on the writing of MARY CASEY. a biographical philosophical novel such as this. For the fictional presentation of Plotinus's life is Rigby & Lewis, 1987, £9.95 (hardback), necessarily interiorized: its conflicts and devel- £4.95 (paperback). opments are intellectual and mental rather than emotional or dramatic. We move from Lycopol- When Mary Casey died in 1980 she left not only a is on the banks of the Nile to Alexandria, the considerable body of poems (two selections from intellectual heart of Empire, where Plotinus which were published the following year by the attends the schools and himself becomes a Enitharmon Press) but also three novels. That teacher of philosophy: the descriptions of the these should have been unpublished was a delib- city, though oblique, are effective. Plotinus then erate choice on their author's part: as with her accompanies the young Emperor Gordian on his poems, she wrote them entirely for her own satis- campaign against the Persians; following the faction. But there was nothing self-indulgent or Emperor's death at the hands of his own soldiery careless about her work, which both elicits and he escapes and stays for a while in Antioch, then rewards a reader's close attention. finally moves to Rome. His story is unfolded Dedicated to her mother Lucy Amelia Penny, through a series of encounters, dialogues and the youngest of the five Powys sisters, The epiphanies, while as a background there is a deft Kingfisher's Wing is an imaginative reconstruct- and meticulous use of physical detail, delicate ion of the life of the third-century philosopher evocations of the various landscapes, together Plotinus. It was the outcome of thoughtful study with an awareness of the encompassing life of of the Enneads. A philosophic romance of this Plotinus's own time, which offsets any tendency kind is more common in nineteenth-century liter- to become too introverted. Mary Casey is ature than it is in our own—one thinks of the especially sensitive to stillness, the power of writings of Walter Savage Landor, of J. H. silence. Her writing is steeped in a sense of the Shorthouse's John Inglesant, and most pervasive beauty of the natural world. But if the particularly of Walter Pater. The influence of book is quietly passionate, it is never precious. Marius the Epicurean on John Cowper Powys As Kathleen Raine writes in an informal pre- has been demonstrated by Ian Hughes in an face, ' 'Plotinus was something far other, and far earlier number of the Powys Review; and there more, than a philosopher in the diminished are faint Paterian echoes to be heard in The modern sense of the term. He was a true 'lover of Kingfisher's Wing, with its meditative manner wisdom'—of the spiritual knowledge that has and conflation of landscape with mood. But the been virtually forgotten in the secular world of prose lacks Pater's opulent quality, its leisurely the modern West." In a further introductory grandiloquence; rather, its relative simplicity piece Gerard Casey, in addition to translating recalls the limpid vocabulary of George Moore's the Isha Upanishad, provides an outline of Plot- The Brook Kerith, a novel concerning Jesus of inus's life and thought, one which is expanded in Nazareth which was widely read during Mary the book itself. The central tenet of Plotinus's Casey's girlhood. But her own novel has none of belief, that the individual soul is a manifestation Moore's easy flow; the sentences and phrases are and expression of the one world soul and can set down simply in a way that arrests rather than only find its fulfilment in a return to its source, is encourages the forward-looking eye, requiring not one which lends itself to dramatic treatment; that one linger over them to ponder their mean- but Mary Casey had studied her subject closely ings and suggestiveness. It is a prose of percept- enough to perceive that to put this belief into ion and meditation, not of rationality and practice involves a questioning of the nature of action. At times the stylistic economy verges on human identity as such, let alone the validity of the cryptic, but as the result more of concen- the life-experience of those who are not touched tration than of clumsiness. One is aware of a by the contemplative ideal or have no leaning distinctly personal voice delighting in what it towards it. " Why live and fast and deny sleep for records, intent on capturing and conveying an a rare or imperfect freedom in knowing that exactitude of inference and meaning. would, in the body's death, be fulfilled once and Reviews 61 for all?'' The slight clumsiness of style performs ary recital''. It is not a story out of the past: it is a a useful function here. The absence of hyphens reading of a reality which is as valid now as it was after "freedom" and "in" will force readers in Plotinus's own time. back to the beginning of the sentence to find out if they have understood it aright: its meaning will GLEN CAVALIERO not be absorbed easily. So Plotinus is seen as wrestling with these problems in the circum- stances of his own life, at once single-minded in The Second Light, his quest and yet responsive to the insights and VILHELM EKELUND. perceptions of his fellow philosophers—who here include Ammonius, Origen and Porphyry. Translated and with an Introduction by Both Christian and Manichean teaching are set LENNART BRUCE; with an Afterword by in dialogue with that of Plotinus. One feels that ERIC O. JOHANNESSON. in writing the book the author is testing and sifting her own beliefs. North Point Press, San Francisco, 1986, $25.00. In the process she forges many memorable epigrams and phrases—translations or adapt- Vilhelm Ekelund (1880-1949), little known out- ations, presumably, of Plotinus's own. The dia- side Scandinavia, was engagingly introduced to logue is dense with the rapid communication of members of the Powys Society by Carl-Erik af ideas. "The light one has seen shines for all." Geijerstam at the 1986 Bath Conference. "You believe you can teach others knowledge; I Readers ignorant of Swedish can now savour an that it can only be known." "Right and wrong enigmatic but rewarding personality in the pages are not absolute but each man's knowledge of of this pioneering American anthology. The the one. That is absolute for him.'' "I must think uninitiated will find the afterword illuminating of the soul not as looking to knowledge but as since it places Ekelund in the Swedish and living knowledge of the good." Here the Swedish-Finnish contexts, while stressing his syntactical ambiguity (is the participle "living" indebtedness to wider European traditions, in used as a verb or an adjective?) enriches rather particular to German literature and philosophy. than obscures the meaning. The phrase reminds "An aristrocratic and exclusive spirit", one of Blake's "I question not my Corporeal or Ekelund was indifferent to the lure of forging a Vegetative Eye any more than I would question a career, seeking satisfaction instead in the solitary window concerning a Sight. I look through it and sculpting of his perceptions of reality. As his not with it." speculations grew more self-centred so their The sense of timelessness, so vital to any imag- expression became ever more hermetic, yielding inative presentation of this philosopher's in the pronouncements of his later years rich thought, is in purely literary terms achieved here pickings for the commentators. Most societies through two devices that are presumably deliber- exact a high price from those who reject tribal ate. One of these is the fusion of Plotinus's norms, and Ekelund, with his solipsist instincts thoughts with their physical occasion: simile and Nietzschean contempt for the vulgar, was a blossoms into metaphor as his awareness is ready victim. Much of his life was to be soured by shaped by what he sees. But there is a more alienation, poverty, illness and conflict with original method at work in the repeated authority. Like Strindberg, Ekelund failed to be introduction of characters whose physical elected a member of the Swedish Academy of presence is made known but whose names are Letters. withheld until they are slipped in almost casually Yet, given notable early successes, a less ill- after the dialogue is well under way. By this starred future might well have been predicted for means, individuals are subordinated to the inter- this blacksmith's son who, after a happy child- change of spirit which unites them. They hood, relished studious pursuits in the university encounter each other in the ambience of the city of Lund. Early maturity as a lyricist enabled Divine Mystery of which they form a part, and in him to publish seven volumes of verse between which their singularity is secondary to the in- 1900 and 1906, so that at twenty-three he had dwelling power which moves them. The whole already established a reputation as "Sweden's novel maintains this proportion between spirit- foremost poet". The editors make little attempt ual and mental action and its physical manifest- to convey the structure and flavour of this imp- ations. Not for nothing is its subtitle "A vision- ressive achievement, though they would perhaps 62 Reviews argue that their main concern in this anthology is opulent living conditions probably possess in- to portray Ekelund as an aphorist and critic: sufficient mental capacities at the outset". itself a daunting task, involving the analysis of In his afterword Eric O. Johannesson examin- twenty-four books of essays and aphoristic es in depth the question of Ekelund's debt to prose. Ekelund himself proffers a characteristic Aestheticism, interpreted by some critics as a paradox in accounting for his switch from poetry narcissistic weakness, by others as the essence of to prose: "Once Emerson, Amiel, Nietzsche had uncompromising artistic integrity. In a magis- discovered the great poem, can anybody any terial evaluation Fredrik Book, perhaps the most longer take 'lyrics', this art of the intellectually authoritative of Swedish critics, likens Ekelund impotent, seriously?" to Thomas a Kempis and Kierkegaard, while After an unsavoury brush with the police in deploring his indifference to social life and the 1908, Ekelund sought refuge in Germany and solace of everyday human companionship. did not return to Sweden till 1921. He seems Few writers have cultivated the aphorism as scarcely to have noticed the upheavals of the tenaciously as Vilhelm Ekelund, yet much of his Great War as, engrossed in his quest for self- work may seem marginal to the mainstream of understanding, he struggled to make a living as a aphoristic tradition. Perhaps this is because in its translator. He viewed the contemporary concise, conventional form the aphorism is German scene with mixed feelings, castigating better attuned to ages of rationality than to less the philistine aspects of bourgeois society while self-assured times (like our own), when modes of deepening his acquaintance with congenial thought and their expression tend to be more writers like the Romantic poet August von hesitant and speculative. We customarily expect Platen, whose homoerotic verses had partly wit, balance and dogmatism as hallmarks of the inspired his own, and Friedrich Nietzsche. While genre. We anticipate the worldly wisdom of La spurning the excesses of the Superman and the Rochefoucauld or a Baltasar Gracian, the Will to Power, he greatly admired the author of acuteness of Lichtenberg or the sledgehammer The Birth of Tragedy, finding parallels to many blows of Samuel Johnson. Though not unap- of his own key ideas in Nietzsche's philological preciative of the French Encyclopaedists, Eke- disquisitions on the culture of the Ancient lund's own manner was sometimes tentative, Greeks; such linguistic probings into the classical quirky and lacking in crispness. At his best, roots of western civilization were indeed increas- however, he can be as lapidary as other masters ingly to dominate his own later studies. of the art, while still sounding his own original Two related concepts much bandied about in note:' 'The day is like a stranger of divine origin, critical appraisals of Ekelund are Decadence and wishing to pay you his visit. You're fortunate if Aestheticism. Certainly this doughty if malad- he finds you at home." justed genius felt an affinity with a whole gallery Within the compass of a brief review it is im- of writers who may loosely be termed Byronic. possible to do justice to the range and profundity His translations embraced Leopardi and of Ekelund's thought; and there is the added Ferdinand Lassalle, whose treatise on Heracleit- difficulty, encountered by Lennart Bruce in his us must have exercised a strong appeal. Included translations, that graceful Swedish rhythms in the present anthology are revelatory essays on must on occasion be sacrificed to eke out essen- Poe and Baudelaire. The panegyric on Poe tial meaning, so that in their English dress ("one of the richest personalities of romantic certain aphorisms wear a lack-lustre air; yet their poetry") had been written for the 1909 centen- creator's idiosyncratic values remain manifest nial celebrations. Seated in a library in Unter den throughout: Linden, Ekelund complains of having to consult the new de luxe edition printed "for the million- The confession-in-disguise of the inadequacy aires of America", adding that "the writings of of all that he has lived and fought for, the Poe, the proletarian, are not available in any sense of the hollowness of his fame, kneeling complete edition for common mortals". These before his own innermost demands: that is the judgements encapsulate Ekelund's austere Pro- genuine and valuable I now find everywhere testant work-ethic. He seldom misses an oppor- in the writings of Ibsen—every place where he tunity to carp at the enervating effects of is honest and 'great'. The disguise is the real affluence, to which he ascribes the falling-off in Ibsen, and it is remarkable that in a final the later stories of Bret Harte, shrewdly noting analysis it is on the ground of this confession- that "people who spontaneously succumb to in-disguise—only vaguely sensed by most Reviews 63 people—that his great fame is founded. Ibsen compares the sceptical humour of Gogol with possesses in his personality a mystique of the that of Cervantes. Both men were regionalists saga, which links him with the Orient! (p. 69) who yet drew intellectual nourishment from European culture at large. Though rooted in the The arcane and frequently elliptical utterances Gothic and Celtic fringes of our continent, they of his final years, typically apparent in the probed the Mediterranean sources of western collection Plus Salis (1945), together with the civilization, seeking to temper northern vigour urge to link Greek with oriental mysticism, may and asperity with southern ease and liberality. well have furthered Ekelund's self-development; The synthesis achieved by Powys was the happier but others may find themselves struggling with one, possibly because he was less reluctant than his cloudy, inspissated arguments: Ekelund to compromise and accept inconsisten- Without any question the metron doctrine— cies. As Goethe has shown, the union of Faust that is the doctrine of Enough—coincides with Helena is fraught with danger. with the Indian-Chinese teachings of a fully realized way of breathing as the source of the CEDRIC HENTSCHEL perpetuation of thought, the principle of hope and belief: entelecheia. (To be seized by Enough: to be seized by the Henry Vaughan: Poet of Revelation, eternity of thought.) NOEL KENNEDY THOMAS. The boundary is the meeting place—the meet- Worthing: Churchman Publishing, 1986, ing the border. Hora vivendi occurs and stands firm when the insight of this concur- £5.95 (paperback). rence, its need to be the first and the most essential, has become all-fulfilling, all- Thomas's book claims that Vaughan has not encompassing, all-illuminating, (pp. 136-7) been well-served by his critics, that many of these are unaware of the tensions generated by the Since it is a common practice to encode private Civil War, and that they have in particular musings, we should not perhaps criticize underestimated the influence of the Bible on Ekelund for the resulting loss in ready intelligib- Vaughan's work. All these claims are difficult to ility. At the same time there is a disquieting side understand, especially the last. If modern to his narcissism, for by a reductio ad absurdum readers cannot identify the exact provenance of the pregnant significance of his truncated the many and interlocking Biblical allusions in, thoughts would seem ultimately to lead to the say, "Religion", the first poem from Silex Scint- silence advocated by Schopenhauer and the illans which Thomas discusses, then Alan Trappists. Sadly, too, his impenetrability Rudrum's Penguin edition of Vaughan has been robbed him of a number of readers who favour thoroughly identifying them ever since 1976. epigrams but are put off by cryptograms. Since the gist of the book and perhaps its useful- It is here that Ekelund parts company with ness is the determined noting of Biblical allus- that unfailingly loquacious communicator John ions and images in the poetry of Vaughan, it is Cowper Powys, whose own ardent belief in a strange that in a treatment of "The Night" personal mythology never precluded vivacious Thomas comments (p. 164) that Vaughan's dialogue with his fellows and who until his retire- picture of Christ there "is probably the warmest ment from the lecture-platform, far from seek- and most intimate he has ever achieved ... a ing seclusion, maintained bustling contact with a direct and strikingly fresh picture of Jesus, broad spectrum of humanity. Personal life- appearing in the pastures of dew, which styles apart, there remain many striking parallels Vaughan has seen with his own eyes". But (apart between these two underrated writers, not least from the critical questions which this begs) lines in the breadth and direction of their literary 31-36 of "The Night", which are quoted in illus- preferences. Both venerated Goethe and tration, are suffused with allusions to the lover Whitman. Both derived inspiration from Niet- of the Song of Songs, his head filled with dew zsche but ultimately found Dostoevski's humane and his locks with the drops of the night, whom message more to their taste. Both were steeped in exegetes from at least the time of St Bernard had the language and philosophy of Ancient Greece. interpreted as Christ. Although Thomas Both were masters of allusion and delighted in doggedly identifies Biblical sources and even original cross-references, as when Ekelund ventures apparently subjective comments on 64 Reviews their symbolism, no mention is made of the vital renewal and the harmony of creation is equally traditions of Biblical exegesis, allegorical inter- unsurprising. The book may have some useful- pretation and typology. These could have ness for sixth-form readers of Vaughan in its strengthened in particular Thomas's arguments paraphrase, explication and annotation. It has a about the poet's apocalyptic and eschatological useful index of poems discussed. This discussion hopes for deliverance from bondage, his hope cannot be said to be very subtle. Observations on for renewal, and his images of light and dark- lyrical beauty, a poem being one of the greatest ness. Vaughan's fondness for the Book of Revel- of Vaughan's lyrics, or a poem having fine ation can come as no surprise. It would have passages are hardly penetrating. The comment been remarkable if a religious poet of his time on the end of "The Call", that it is a perfect had not been interested in the Apocalypse, example of Vaughan's ability to express "even whose influence on Renaissance literature has personal passionate emotion by using Biblical been examined, inter alia, in a collection of thought and imagery", would be unremarkable essays edited by Wittreich and Patrides. Perhaps about any seventeenth-century English poet. what might have been interesting is the way in which Revelation was read in conjunction with GARETH ROBERTS and was seen as answering other Biblical pas- sages. A longing for deliverance in the coming of the Bridegroom and Judge draws on exegetical and typological play among the Song of Songs, From Fox How to Fairy Hill. Matthew Arnold's the parable of the wise and foolish virgins and Celtic connections with special reference to the parts of the Apocalypse. The interconnections, Bensons of Fairy Hill, Gower, South Wales, although quite commonplace, might illuminate JOAN H. HARDING. Vaughan's poetry as they do J. S. Bach's cantata Wachet Auf. D. Brown and Sons, 1986, £7.95. Thomas's apparent reluctance, like that of Ben Jonson's Ananias, to consider "trad- "Genealogy has its own charm, and families are itions' ' which are not exclusively Biblical extends the real units of social history", claims A. L. to his apparent distaste for investigation of Rowse's preface to this study of Matthew Hermetic and occult influences on Vaughan Arnold's Welsh in-laws, and the text demon- which he feels have "distracted" Vaughan's strates it. A fascinating aspect of social history— critics (p. 13). Thomas's almost puritan critical of Victorian social history, certainly—is the way position seems at odds with the man he sees as an all well-known families turn out to be related to Anglican and Royalist poet in sad captivity to each other, and the middle class, which histor- Puritans claming the exclusive authority of the ians assure us was getting bigger and bigger, act- Word and denying any learning other than ins- ually appears to be contracting to a handful of piration. He resolutely gathers a whole herd of interrelated individuals. The Arnolds are as Biblical assess (pp. 96-101) in explicating "The good an example as any of the phenomenon. Ass", "arguably one of the most moving of all Thomas Arnold himself was at the head of a clan seventeenth century religious lyrics". But the which in its own name provided notable figures poet's crucial petition, which Thomas quotes, in the new, expanding areas of the middle class, "Let me thy Ass be onely wise / To carry, not in the colonies, in the services, in education, in search mysteries'' also alludes to a tradition, that literature: his younger sons, Tom and William, of asinus portans mysteria, which is discernible opened up or helped to administer New Zealand, in Erasmus, at the end of Agrippa's De Vanitate Australia, India, and his eldest son Matthew, the Scientarum and in Una's mount in Faerie most famous Arnold of them all, as well as being Queene, especially I vi. One of the things that Professor of Poetry at Oxford, was among the may mark Vaughan as not Puritan is a first school inspectors. Tom, thwarted in his syncretism in outlook and in his combination of design of marrying the daughter of Archbishop sources and traditions. A critic's turning away Whately, his father's old friend from Oriel days, from these may falsify a picture of Vaughan. and still a household name, married into a family As one is unsurprised to find that a mid-seven- of Australia administrators; and William teenth century Christian poet is influenced by the married the daughter of the explorer who dis- Apocalypse, so a chapter on his use of the covered the sources of the Ganges. Matthew imagery of light and darkness, on ideas of married a Judge's daughter, Frances Lucy Reviews 65 Wightman. Meanwhile the doctor's daughter, viewed the Popish extravagances of a Ritualist Jane, married W. E. Forster, the noted edu- priest with deep distrust. cationalist who gave his name to the Education It is interesting, though not, perhaps, surpris- Act of 1870 which changed British society. ing that the Arnold connections with Church In the next generation the daughter of his history should be persistent, pervasive, and second son, born while Tom Arnold was inspect- controversial. (Dr Harding quotes a more ing the schools of Tasmania, became Mrs recent descendant of the doctor as being actively Humphry Ward and an astonishingly successful concerned in resisting Welsh Disestablishment in novelist, reviewed by Gladstone and esteemed 1912.) Thomas Arnold was a great reformer and, (however ironically) by her friend Henry James; in turbulent times for the church, his orthodoxy and his sister Julia married Leonard Huxley, son was frequently suspect, for he saw the ideal of T. H. Huxley, who shared his father's church of England as including all British passionate interest in science. Julia became the Christians sharing a basic common denominator mother of Julian and Aldous Huxley, thus of belief. For his eldest son, Matthew, the relig- continuing the Arnold commitment to liter- ious question was the greatest challenge of his ature, science, and high moral purpose. Mary career, and one at which he toiled all his life. He Arnold's daughter, meanwhile, married George felt the social necessity for religion, and he Trevelyan, the historian chiefly responsible for largely rejected orthodox Christianity, and, as the twentieth-century school of history, and the sage who succeeded Carlyle in popular himself in close line of descent from both esteem, his answers to the dilemma were public. Hannah Moore and Lord Macaulay: the Arnold Dr Harding comments on the possible embar- clan extended further still. rassment caused to the High Church Benson These are well-known facts. But who would family by their heretical relation. His brother have thought that Thomas Arnold, notorious as Tom, however, resolved the same dilemmas the enemy of the Oxford Movement, the dramatically by his conversion to the Roman vehement anti-Tractarian, would also number Church in 1855, which wrecked both his profes- among his descendants "the reviver of the Rel- sional and his domestic life, first in Australia and igious Life in the Church of England", R. M. then in England. Nine years later he reconsidered Benson, founder of the Cowley Fathers? Dr his decision and returned to the Anglican Harding's extensively researched little book is communion; but in 1876, as he was on the point full of such nuggets of information like this of securing the Chair of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, about the scarcely thought of branch of the he reverted to the Catholic Church, and Oxford Arnold family in South Wales. Arnold's lost interest in him. Cambrian and Celtic themes are an important His daughter Mary has recorded the traumatic part of his work, and his essay "On the Study of effects of his spiritual agonizing in the context of Celtic Literature" is an early landmark in the his home life. She herself, however, was later to area. Dr Harding pinpoints a memorable visit to flutter ecclesiastical dove-cots on her own the Bensons on the Gower in 1879, and mentions account with her phenomenally successful novel many meetings between the families. One Robert Elsmere (1888), in which a young priest notable visit to Wales was at the invitation of the imperils his marriage (much like her father) by National Eisteddfod in 1885, when Matthew his dawning conviction that, in Matthew stayed not with his in-laws but at the house of Arnold's words, "miracles do not happen", and Lord Aberdare. that all the supernatural elements of Christianity Usually, however, the Arnolds stayed with the are a sham. Robert Elsmere, to the dismay of his Bensons. Richard Benson, brother-in-law to wife, feels obliged to renounce his orders, and Mrs Arnold's sister, went to Oxford in 1843, and goes on to achieve sainthood in the secular became Vicar of Cowley there inl850.ini 866 he context of the East End slums. Robert Elsmere is and two other priests founded the Society of St. as much a sign of the times, in fact, as Culture John the Evangelist, better known as the Cowley and Anarchy or even "Stanzas from the Grande Fathers, and Father Benson became the Super- Chartreuse" and must have embarrassed the ior. The new order spread all over the world, and family at Fairy Hill as much as the works of the Superior was much occupied in travelling Mary's Uncle Matthew. How, we may wonder, between the communities in India, South Africa did the pious Bensons regard their unorthodox and North America—though at home Wales, relations? No evidence is available—though the according to the Swansea Glamorgan Herald, affection of the Arnolds for Wales and the 66 Reviews Welsh is demonstrated throughout Matthew the role of prostitution in order to see beyond Arnold's letters. The inaccuracy of the notes, in Halperin's conclusion that Gissing's sexual this context, is the one irritating detail of the fantasies "embodied a measure of sado-masoch- book. ism". Wider influences are at work. The same is true of the morbidity Halperin BARBARA DENNIS finds in Gissing's attitude to death: Gissing certainly visited many cemeteries on his travels abroad, as Halperin notes, but one would want Gissing: A Life in Books, to know how typical such behaviour was before JOHN HALPERIN. judging it as odd. We might then be able to re- concile it with Gissing's absence from his first Oxford University Press, 1987, wife's funeral; here Halperin quite helpfully £6.95 (paperback) draws attention to the popular practice of paying others to represent the mourners. John Halperin's study must surely be the definit- Perhaps this is indeed hypercriticism. Hal- ive biography of George Gissing, and its public- perin's subject is Gissing and understandably he ation now in paperback should do much to analyses Gissing's behaviour in terms of ensure its very welcome place on the shelves of personal pyschology rather than in terms of Gissing enthusiasts. Pooling the knowledge of Victorian culture. And the book is already a long previous biographers and drawing on the un- one. Nevertheless, whilst Halperin's approach published study by the foremost Gissing author- produces a lively biography, I find it unhelpful in ity, Pierre Coustillas, Halperin lucidly and his discussion of Gissing's fiction, which is after dramatically traces the many falls and the all the basis of interest in Gissing. occasional rise of one of the most prolific of According to Halperin, Gissing's work Victorian novelists. And with remarkable skill "demands of the reader an awareness of bio- Halperin succeeds within this chronological graphical matters for fullest understanding." framework in dealing with Gissing's entire Certainly as more biographical details have literary output. The result is a full-length but emerged since Gissing's death it has become never tedious literary work in its own right. increasingly difficult to read the novels without In the light of this achievement my reservat- reference to the life, and Halperin's study is ions may appear hypercritical since they are not particularly good in drawing the parallels addressed specifically either at Halperin's craft between the biography and the fiction. Yet I or at his knowledge of George Gissing. Never- think it insufficient to use such parallels prim- theless, some words are perhaps necessary on the arily to explain the frame of mind of the author place of biography within Gissing studies, of the fiction, to give the novels the status of especially as they have a relevance for the study what Halperin calls "a spiritual autobio- of other writers. graphy." Halperin's subject is Gissing. Gissing's Halperin's thesis is that the flow from life to subjects, Halperin tells us, are sex, money, and art is in Gissing a two-way movement and that class, dovetailing into the single subject of "Gissing used his fiction as a sort of testing- marriage. The problem for me is not that this laboratory for actuality". This is seen particul- observation has been made before, which it has, arly, according to Halperin, in Gissing's second but that in dealing with these topics Halperin marriage. Gissing's meeting with Edith Under- rarely allows himself to consider their signif- wood in September 1890 and the relief of his icance within a wider perspective. For example, (sexual) loneliness enabled him to recommence Halperin ascribes to Gissing a sexual fantasy and finish New Grub Street. However, his which recurs in the novels, that of being married marriage to Edith Underwood in the following to a respectable woman whilst sleeping with a February followed the miserable pattern worked (redeemed) prostitute. To be sure, Gissing out in several of the plots of New Grub Street. himself married two lower-class women, one Similarly, as Peachey leaves his wife in In the probably a prostitute, but this shows not that Year of Jubilee, written in 1894, so Gissing was such fantasies are purely personal, despite the to act and feel when he left Edith in 1897. "The personal investment, but that Gissing's fiction immense power of In the Year of Jubilee," deals with contemporary themes. One needs to Halperin concludes, "like that of New Grub look at Victorian attitudes to sex in marriage and Street, lies in its autobiographical content." Reviews 67 The basic problem of this biographical/spirit- Caitlin: Life with Dylan Thomas, ual autobiography approach is its somewhat CAITLIN THOMAS with GEORGE simplistic division between life and art. All that TREMLETT. Halperin says of the novels seems fair and reasonable if we separate the life from the fiction Seeker and Warburg, 1986, £10.95. (though there is an unreasonable tendency to use autobiographical content as a way of discrimin- In 1985 George Tremlett spent three weeks in ating between the good novels and the bad), but Catania at Caitlin Thomas's home. There he it is not such a huge step from such observations recorded fifty hours of interviews which to argue that if Gissing's actions and the actions produced 250,000 words rearranged and edited of his protagonists coincide then both are sub- into the 85,000 words of the volume now under jected to similar cultural forces. Indeed, Gissing review. It is a book to be read with caution. Not himself held the view that the worth of his novels only is it about a relationship that ended a long should be judged according to how they portrayed time ago and, then, was often hazed with contemporary life. The parallels between alcohol, but we have also to wonder about the Gissing's fiction and his life are extremely effect of the editing on what purport to be important, but not because Gissing may have Caitlin's own words and the effect on the editing been punishing himself by entering a marriage he itself of the book's determinedly popular appeal. had foreseen would prove disastrous, but because To judge from the provision of basic inform- they both realize behavioural narratives latent in ation it aims at the non-literary reader for whom late-Victorian society. If Gissing's fiction was a Richard Hughes has to be identified as "the testing laboratory, it was a testing laboratory for author of A High Wind in Jamaica", Montale as a whole social reality, for the way a society "one of the most distinguished Italian poets" defines itself through and by its narratives. and who, to judge from the insertion of basic The weakness of Halperin's biography is very biographical information into Caitlin's narrat- much the weakness of the biographical project as ive knows little of Dylan Thomas's career. And a whole, that of privileging the life of the the text is organized to make the most of Cait- individual. This does of course produce an inter- lin's revelations about sexual life with Dylan, esting book but it should be remembered that with asides featuring Augustus John and others: biography is never neutral, that it too as a genre the first chapter describes Caitlin's first meeting contributes to our perception of the world. What and love-making with Dylan, Chapter Four ends I am therefore drawing attention to here is the with the repetition of the preface's observation necessity for a wider understanding of the forces that their main marital problem was, as she puts that surround and to some extent create the it, "that I never had an orgasm in all my years individual, precisely those forces such as sex, with Dylan". Why this was a greater problem money, and class which were Gissing's subjects. than, say, the couple's chronic lack of cash is In this way we can come to see the limitations of never explained. A further reason for caution is the division between the life of the individual and that Tremlett writes as a family friend: the art, and, getting beyond a simplistic biograph- history of the genre bears mute (and not so mute) ical account of Gissing's fiction, understand it as witness to the dire effects of that relationship on a staging of Victorian culture. This to be sure is a the would-be candid biographer. complex project and one that can take many That said, Tremlett's text is lively and compul- forms, but with the publication of this definitive sive reading, albeit invariably sad and occasion- biography of George Gissing it is to be hoped ally harrowing. Caitlin's account of her upbring- that the limited biographical project has run its ing is a useful supplement to her sister, Nicolette course and that the new project can address itself Devas's Two Flamboyant Fathers; her descript- more thoroughly to the task of analysing the ion of life with Augustus John and his circle is many parallels between Gissing's life and fiction notable for its vivid (and slightly comic) account within a more rigorous framework. of Augustus John raping her after each of numerous portrait sittings and of his jealousy of ANDREW HASSAM Dylan, and for her description of unrequited love for Caspar John. But the bulk of the book is about married life with Dylan and though the standard account of this—in Ferris's Dylan Thomas supplemented 68 Reviews by his edition of the Collected Letters—is not depends upon its links with it. Dylan Thomas is substantially altered, modern frankness important because he celebrates the middle- provides new details of their sex-life, of Caitlin's class, suburban world, which might seem sur- abortions, of Dylan's "femininity", and blow-by- prising to those who watched his more outrage- blow accounts of their quarrels. And the widow ous antics or read his work superficially. adds her weight to what Paul Ferris suggests in The second point is a version of the first. Cait- his biography, that whatever Dylan's general lin can only puzzle over the relationship between psychological and physiological state (in Cait- the deeply-flawed human being and the fine lin's view neither were of mortal seriousness) his poet. "Genius is selfish", she surmises, and "I death seems to have been the direct result of could see some God-given quality in him, some- dubious medical attention. We learn also, for the thing special". To say that he often behaved first time with certainty, that the death antici- abominably is an understatement; Caitlin's pated the break-up of the marriage. This last fact sense of pain at his failure to turn up at the hos- notwithstanding, central to this new memoir is pitals when the children were born and the way Caitlin's expression of her deep and enduring he left her "to face the abortions alone" still love for her long-dead husband. Her final words persists. There was, she concludes, "some part on the subject are very moving: of Dylan that could not come to terms with life . . . [with] . . . loyalty to one woman, having I still feel that Dylan is with me ... I felt he babies, deaths in the family, kindness to friends was right for me from the very beginning, and . . . It's quite a common thing in people, but it's if you think someone is meant for you, you strange in a poet whose finest work was analys- can accept a lot . . . Our love was pretty ing life, birth and death". simple, really .... "Strange" is as far as she (and we) can get. ... much of my last thirty years has been an Certainly she doesn't get far with Dylan's emotional blank: I haven't felt the same poetry: the observation about his "finest intensity of emotions since Dylan died. I feel work", supported by a brief reference to "Light as though I am out of this world; I just keep Breaks Where No Sun Shines", is unusual in a going, that's all, and I am very attached to my book mainly concerned with the personal rather children. than the creative side of Dylan. In a letter to Paul Ferris in 1977 Caitlin insisted that she was "not The force of such feelings survives time and clever enough to read the poetry". Now she is editing. They are essentially a gloss on the title less modest, stressing her liking for the "short, and theme of Caitlin's Thomas's first book, the passionate poems like 'And Death Shall Have anguished and inchoately impressive Leftover No Dominion' or 'The Force That Through the Life to Kill (1957). Such moments of deeply-felt Green Fuse Drives the Flower' " and later "sim- reflection comprise the most valuable parts of plifying" poems like "Fern Hill" and "Poem in this new exploration and succeed in making two October". Occasionally, she tells us, Dylan points. would read drafts to her, ask her opinion and First, that Caitlin's love did not help her sometimes accept suggestions. But such refer- towards a full understanding of her husband. Of ences hardly convince us that she played much of course she had a fine grasp of aspects of Dylan's a part in his literary life. And, to judge from this character: she realized at an early stage that memoir, she could not offer him any knowledge- "underneath all the external flamboyance, able criticism. Dylan was a fairly conventional man" and "a The point is important in emphasizing that typical Welsh nonconformist at heart". That we ' 'loneliness" is a key concept in Dylan Thomas's now see clearly his provincialism, surburbanism, life and one that has considerable critical potent- and middle-classness is a tribute to Caitlin's ial: he was ostensibly at odds with the world of quick perception. But she saw these qualities as his upbringing, had no close friends who could faults, and from her own point of view as command his constant loyalty, the most solitary the aristocratic Celt who was also the true of professions, and a marriage to a woman bohemian they may well have been. We are whose lack of intellectual grip and understand- slowly realizing, as she did not, that they are the ing of his personal complexities, together with source of Thomas's poetic strengths; his writing, the bitterness she felt at the way her life had gone for so long seen as a stylized and perhaps avant and at her husband's treatment of her, her own garde reaction to prosaic social routine, in fact drinking and genuine disdain for conventional Reviews 69 behaviour, isolated him, paradoxically, within a include titles of translated works which are loving relationship. discussed only under their first-language titles, It is idle to speculate on what might have been such as Saunders Lewis's Treason and Tomorrow's if Thomas had not married her or if, in 1953, Wales and, even more usefully, the medieval they had gone their separate ways. All that can mystery play, The Three Kings from Cologne. be said is that their life together was a context for There are suggestions for further reading after many fine poems. To amend a famous opening: many entries and these are well chosen. out of the sighs came much of great and enduring The second largest category of entries is value. Caitlin: Life with Dylan Thomas, read devoted to prosody, literary genres (with special with care, is a fascinating insight into a life and reference to Welsh literature), motifs, manu- world that is still not properly understood. scripts, serials, novels, verse, story collections and anthologies. But, as the editor correctly JAMES A. DAVIES states, "the book is much more than a gazetteer of writers and their works". It is a genuine com- panion to literature and has entries on those, The Oxford Companion to the Literature of from patriots to politicians, saints to soldiers, Wales, villains and eccentrics, who have contributed to Edited by MEIC STEPHENS. Welsh life and history. There are entries on customs and games, on folk traditions and Oxford University Press, 1986, £17.50. sports, trade unions and political movements, on institutions and events. Thus, Devolution and, The first thing to be said of The Oxford Com- under Temperance, Sunday Closing are discus- panion to the Literature of Wales is that, like any sed (Neil Kinnock's rebellion against his own good companion, it is thoroughly enjoyable. It is party in the campaign for the former being given also informative and wide-ranging; it wears its prominent mention); there are entries on such evident learning lightly; it is not without a sense topics—taken at random—as hiraeth, cnapan, of humour; in the areas in which I can judge, it noson lawen, knitting nights, pilnos, Old King achieves a decent level of accuracy (something Cole, love-spoons, the summer birch, drovers, one cannot say of all guides and companions); Rebecca and the riots that gave that enterprising and it moves between Welsh and English with journal its name, corgis and corn dollies. It commendable facility. Although its 2,825 entries might have been handy to have listed the many are the work of 222 contributors, a harmonious castles discussed under the heading, "Castle". tone and an admirable sense of proportion is The origin of the "Angels of Mons" legend is everywhere evident. The submission of entries in found under the "Bowmen of Agincourt"; there the English and Welsh languages could not have is space for a joke against the Welsh under made the editor's task easy but the very process "Welsh Rabbit"—St Peter's cry of "Caws of close application to language may very well pobi!" ("Toasted cheese!") to clear heaven of have proved an aid to achieving so homogeneous Welshmen clamouring for the best jobs; and a result. there are succinct accounts of the Welsh language, Patagonia, grammar schools, the Just under half the entries are devoted to Demetae, the Battle of Bosworth (a little too full, authors, the majority of whom wrote in Welsh. this one), and many more. A note on the pro- A few English writers, among them Arnold, nunciation of Welsh and a chronology of the Borrow, Hopkins, Kilvert and Peacock, whose history of Wales are also provided. It really is a work "touched on Wales and the Welsh" are rich haul and can fairly claim to be a cultural, included; authors such as Mrs Hemans, born in historical and social companion. The critical Liverpool but who lived for some twenty-five element in the entries is judicious and condescen- years in north Wales, are noted, as are some sion is avoided in commenting on entries in the English works with Welsh subjects, such as the popular field—on Max Boyce, say, or "We'll play attributed to Robert Armin (the actor who Keep a Welcome". There is the very occasional played Lear's Fool), The Valiant Welshman uncertainty of tone, in, for example, the suggest- (1615), and T. W. H. Crosland's Taffy was a ion that Mrs Hemans's "fondness for the Welshman (1912). The cross-referencing of scenery of north Wales was doubtless sincere". authors and entries generally is an important feature of the book and is well done. Possibly It is easy to suggest for any work that must this could have been extended a little further to perforce be selective items that might have been 70 Reviews included. Shakespeare's Welsh characters Anglo- Welsh Literature: An Illustrated History, (especially the Lady who sings in Welsh) and ROLAND MATHIAS. Jonson's For the Honour of Wales deserve entries (if not Fielding's The Welsh Opera), and Poetry Wales Press, 1987, £5.95 (paperback). Welsh gold, mutation, and satire might have been expected in the Companion. But space is First the Oxford Companion, now an illustrated always short and much had to be omitted. history: these are brighter days for Anglo-Welsh However, in so generously-framed a com- literature. God has indeed put a new wick in the panion, an area that strikes me as done less than sun. Initially Anglo-Welsh Literature might justice is music. There are entries on hymns and raise a few eyebrows; to cover five centuries in hymn-tunes, on certain songs, the harp, Cerdd little more than a hundred pages, half of which Dant, and Stable Loft Singing, for example, so are devoted to the period before 1900, smacks of music is not ignored, but I am surprised not to the superficial and unbalanced, but this emphat- find an entry for Music itself, nor for Chorus, ically Roland Mathias is not. His survey sets Choral Singing, Song, or Male Voice Choir, nor literature firmly in the social context and his for one of Wales's contemporary glories, the broader concerns—the historical relationship Welsh National Opera. One might think that the within Wales of English language, society and South Wales Voice is restricted to Llais Llafurl writing to their Welsh counterparts—marshall a One or two minor modifications seem desir- text where assessments of individual writers able. St David's, Lampeter, was not concerned seem rather less important; they are subsumed only to enrol candidates for the Anglican within a persuasive social and cultural analysis. ministry; a shorter course was offered to non- For the earlier periods the approach works conformists from early days and the fourth particularly well. Mathias here performs work charter of 1896 reaffirmed that the College's for which he is outstandingly equipped. And it is practice had always been to "receive and educate pioneering work; a comprehensive mapping of any person whatsoever, whether destined for previously obscure terrain. The erudition goes Holy Orders or not" (D. T. W. Price, A History hand-in-hand with a sober critical judgement. of St David's University College Lampeter, His authors are mostly unread and, so it seems, 1977, i, 167). St David's, incidentally, does not unreadable: by his own estimate no more than a deserve to be included in the general stricture in half-dozen Anglo-Welsh authors of the period the entry on the University of Wales that the Uni- before 1900 produced imaginative literature of versity was slow to promote the study of Anglo- enduring value; they are of interest sociologic- Welsh literature. The entry for Carol makes no ally or not at all. Outside the domain of liter- mention that this term was originally applied to a ature, the record is better, with early offerings in round dance; possibly in Wales it was only found history, religion and science being particularly in the sung form but that might well be made impressive. This sixteenth-century outflow is a clear. Rugby was played in Wales before the manifestation of the stiffening pride and rapid 1870s and it was not then "confined to the advance of Welshmen under the Tudor crown. coastal towns" alone. As D. T. W. Price states, With the Stuart succession begins the slow "In the 1860s St David's College had a good decline of national confidence, a process not fifteen, which may indeed have been the first arrested until the eighteenth century and the established team in Wales" (i, 152). And, a final naturalization of Methodism. Religious dissent Lampeter contribution: Unitarianism in Wales had the effect of further alienating the English- goes back more than a century before the date speaking minority, and Mathias's chapters on given in the Companion for the establishment of the Anglo-Welsh gentry and bourgeoisie are a the first meeting-house (c. 1794). If I remember dismal catalogue of non-achievement, a sit- rightly from living nearby, Caeronnen, Cellan, uation he sees bound up with "confidence and was founded in 1654. viable tradition": "those who spoke and wrote only English, of whatever class, were farther But let not these minor quibbles dissuade than ever from a Welsh tradition and disin- anyone from enjoying a thoroughly useful and a clined, except in rare cases of bitterness, to use it: most entertaining book. English verse models were inevitably to hand, and those of the simplest: the determination to PETER DAVISON develop even an occasional Welsh subject [A Welsh edition, Cydymaith iLenyddiaeth Cymru, became progressively feebler". is published by the University of Wales Press.] Reviews 71 The nineteenth century affords the greatest their Anglo-Welsh intention, though a book of contrast between literary achievements in Welsh this length can barely encompass that glorious (across a wide intellectual range and reflecting a outburst fifty years ago when, in little more than strengthened nationalist purpose) and the pallid a decade, there arrived Dylan Thomas, Margiad growths of English-language poetry and fiction. Evans, Jack Jones, Geraint Goodwin, Glyn Faced by such paucity at the centre, Mathias Jones, Gwyn Jones, David Jones, Idris Davies, resists recruiting indiscriminately to the ranks of Richard Llewelyn, Vernon Watkins, Alun the Anglo-Welsh. Henry Vaughan remains a Lewis, Gwyn Thomas, R. S. Thomas and Emyr Metaphysical ("the love of his native region is Humphreys. Comments on these and others are not in doubt, but the Welshness is in the location delivered with the practitioner's awareness and a of it, not in the poetry"), though certain nine- sometimes refreshing astringency. Gwyn Jones teenth-century immigrants, by their long resi- escapes the schematic net: at once translator of dence and receptivity to Wales, merit consider- the Mabinogion and unabashed champion of the ation: the poets range from Gerard Manley first flowering: "I think they arrived in the best Hopkins to Felicia Hemans. Mrs Hemans's pop- possible way, with the maximum of offence and ularity mystifies modern readers, as does Car- the maximum of effect". Gwyn Jones has also marthen-born Lewis Morris's at the turn of the spoken of the Welsh tradition as a repository century; his Collected Works sold 11,000 copies needed by Anglo-Welsh writers, the great bank in five years. Both of course were left trailing by on which they all draw. Roland Mathias makes a the novelist Allen Raine, who gave Anglo-Welsh similar point and in acknowledging that many of literature its first true commodity texts. Writers the younger English-language writers of Wales like these remind us that literary history is also are now oblivious to that tradition, that their the history of publishers and readers. (Mrs models and influences have become naturally Hemans, one might note, was published by and inevitably English, he foresees the demise of Blackwood.) Anglo-Welsh literature as anything more than a Chapter Eleven, "Changes in Society", geographical label. Though he sketches scenar- provides an excellent point of access for readers ios that might allow for a literature of Wales true particularly interested in twentieth-century to the tradition he celebrates, through his final literature. Taking a cue from Glyn Jones, it chapter sound the requiem chords. sketches the background of writers who con- Anglo-Welsh Literature: An Illustrated tributed most to the great outpouring of the History might have placed more emphasis on the 1930s and 40s; those who grew up in South Wales book trade. If authors make books, so do pub- between the wars and during the Depression, of lishers, reviewers and readers: the forces that unexalted social rank, nonconformist in religion institutionalize authors, with vital consequences and radical in politics. Their background for reputation. Roland Mathias mentions the ruptured the social basis of English-language varying commercial impact of categories of writing in Wales, allying them to their Welsh- writer, the audience for R. S. Thomas as language contemporaries. English-language opposed to Dylan Thomas, the changing reader- authors of this generation came from Welsh- ship for an Emyr Humphreys or a Dannie Abse; speaking families and were intimately in touch literary historians will need also to consider how with a Welsh way of life. For Roland Mathias Dylan Thomas, in a way not matched in modern this proximity to Welsh tradition classically literature, simultaneously engaged two quite defines the Anglo-Welsh core and shapes his distinct readerships, one still happily oblivious view of modern developments. The so-called of the other. The basic fact of Welsh book-trade "first flowering" he sees as a presentation (in- history is, of course, that the Principality never volving more than a little exploitation) of Welsh developed its own publishing houses (as opposed subject matter for a substantially English to printer-publishers). But the situation is market. The overlapping "second movement", changing and in Welsh Arts Council subsidies with its call to an older Welsh tradition "in for local publishers Mathias sees a significant which the poet had a duty to his community as shift: as Anglo-Welsh authors publish more well as to his muse'', performs a healing mission. frequently in Wales so their access to London Mathias's discussion of movements and reviewing columns diminishes. There are conse- trends rarely blinds him to individuality: part- quences here for readership; this, it is argued, icular authors are recognized for their creative has now come to include a disproportionately achievement as much as for the worthiness of large number of Welsh speakers. Allied to local 72 Reviews developments are major changes in the London Richard Hughes: Novelist, (one might say international) book trade: RICHARD POOLE. London publishers, looking back on Anglo- Welsh bestsellers, lament that contraction of the Poetry Wales Press, 1987, £12.95. market for "regional" fiction. One can only speculate on the implications for writing from Richard Poole is a familiar name to anyone Wales, traditionally rooted in place, but with or interested in the writings of Richard Hughes. He without Arts Council subsidy there will be new edited a collection of Hughes's North African circuits for the Anglo-Welsh book. stories for Chatto & Windus in 1979, In the Lap A sense of the book trade sheds light on a of Atlas: brought together that fascinating matter raised more than once by Roland selection of Hughes's essays, Fiction as Truth, Mathias: the publication of My People. He five years later, and is himself author of one of revives the notion (it has surfaced in the new the most stimulating articles on the novelist, "In Companion) that Caradoc Evans was led by the Hazard: The Theory and Practice of Richard The Perfidious Welshman and Taffy was a Hughes's Art''. Mr Poole has now produced the Welshman towards a lucrative English market most significant work yet to appear on Richard for anti-Welsh books. Evans attached himself to Hughes, being a critical survey of his entire more than one literary tradition (including that career. The most substantial work available on of Welsh underground satire represented by him, until now, has been Peter Thomas's mono- Thomas Cynfelyn Benjamin), none designed to graph in the Writers of Wales series, published in make him rich. As a purveyor of popular fiction 1973, three years before the novelist's death. in the columns of Ideas he knew what kind of With this new work, we now have—in a compact book sold and could have been under no misap- 253 pages—a biography, a critical introduction prehension about Johnson and Crosland. The to the works, and a bibliography of his principal undoubted success of Crosland's The Unspeak- writings, including essays, introductions and able Scot (1902) spawned a host of imitators, reviews as well as the fiction. none of which made money. Crosland comments Mr Poole prefaces the biographical section of on this himself, and a glance through the English his book with the warning that, "I have sought Catalogue confirms their lack of commercial to compete neither with Penny Hughes's delight- success. Crosland placed Taffy was a Welshman ful Memoir of her father (Richard Hughes: with Ewart, Seymour and Co.; meanwhile Hut- Author, Father) nor with the work of Hughes's chinson were pushing Allen Raine sales up to two authorized biographer, Richard Perceval million. No wonder Caradoc's reply to the Graves. Rather, my purpose has been to sketch repeated accusation that he sold himself for in enough of the life to show what sort of writer English gold was that if that had been the Hughes was." Even this "sketch" shows what a intention he would have fashioned "nice false very eventful life Hughes led. It would indeed novels" about Wales; then "I might gather have been difficult for anyone born in the last enough wealth in three years to enable me to year of the nineteenth century to have led a com- retire''. And anything less like a commodity text pletely uneventful life. Hughes served briefly than My People is difficult to imagine. during the First World War (though without Ninety-eight illustrations adorn Anglo-Welsh seeing action), and held an important post in the Literature. They are interesting and attractive, Admiralty between 1940 and 1945 (after which though with a couple only of full-page dimen- he was presented with an OBE). He travelled sion one wonders whether the larger format has widely in Eastern Europe after coming down been fully exploited. And the 5lA. inch line- from Oxford in 1922, becoming involved briefly length is excessive. But at this price the book is a in Balkan politics. During the later nineteen- bargain and an excellent addition to the twenties and nineteen-thirties he made several impressive Poetry Wales Press list. trips into the interior of North Africa. And even as he approached sixty, he made an extended JOHN HARRIS journey from Malta, around Greece, to Istanbul in a tiny sailing boat, together with his daughter Penelope and a few friends. After reading this curriculum vitae, however, what particularly remains in the memory is an incident from one night in the middle of the Second World War. Reviews 73 Hughes was fire-watching from the roof of the SS Phemius, real-life counterpart of Archimedes, Empire Hotel in Bath (requisitioned by the the experiences of which in a Caribbean hurri- Admiralty) when the first of the "Baedecker cane provided him with the raw material for In Raids" on the city was made by German Hazard). There are many occasions where one bombers: his reaction was not simply one of fear feels that Mr Poole is absolutely right and that or horror, however, but also of awe and wonder his conclusions chime with one's own (always an at this real-life son et lumiere. Poole quotes agreeable sensation); there are occasions, too, Hughes's reaction from his account (in a BBC where one disagrees with him, and—where a case broadcast): is properly argued—this is equally enjoyable: with Richard Hughes in particular, contradict- As a spectacle, for sheer pyrotechnic ion is as important to the apprehension of a work ' grandeur, this was one of the most beautiful as to its conception. An example of the former is sights I have ever witnessed. Far too beautiful the characterization of A High Wind in Jamaica to be frightening. You may be shocked at this: as "a novel which asks to be read as a post-Dar- I can't help it, I am telling truly what I felt. winian fable.'' This is spot-on: not only in seeing Every fire had a colour of its own, which the competition for survival between ruthless changed from minute to minute. Burning children and not-terribly-ruthless pirates, but buildings were flung so high they almost just as tellingly in the similarity of tone which is seemed to hang in the air before they fell again identified between Charles Darwin's descriptive prose and that of Hughes's ambiguously cold- One suspects that Hughes was shocked at his blooded narrator in the novel. We should also be own intoxicated reaction. Compared with the grateful to Mr Poole for his bringing into the poignant account of the raid's victims later in the light and discussing of Hughes's lesser works. If piece, this seems an almost cold-blooded, the novels have had little critical attention paid aesthetic appreciation of the event as a massive to them, these poems, plays and stories have firework display. Hughes, of course, was the been largely ignored; indeed, the poems and first to appreciate these utterly contradictory "grownups' " stories have been out-of-print reactions within himself. An appreciation of since the nineteen-twenties! Of particular inter- paradox is detectable from his earliest novels, est is the reproduction of Hughes's undergrad- but this incident seems to have moved him uate poem, "The Heathen's Song", for the first especially, and he also discussed it in a letter time since its notorious appearance in The Isis in home at the time (quoted in his daughter's 1921, when it almost resulted in his expulsion memoir). This apprehension of the undeniable from Oxford University for blasphemy. The co-existence of the utterly beautiful and the failure by so many to realize that the poem, utterly cruel in a single "historical" event may mocking the gentle God of the early Christians, even have been one of the seeds which resulted in was an exercise in irony, in an assumed voice, his ambitious last project, The Human Predica- curiously pre-figures the misinterpretation of ment. Hughes's major works which has continued to this day. In the second part of Mr Poole's book, a chapter is devoted to each of the novels with There are certainly reservations one would another on the early works, interspersed by two wish to express about Richard Hughes: Novelist. separate sections entitled "Theory''. An immed- it does contain a fair number of errors in iately noticeable aspect of this critical part is the spelling, punctuation and even in factual detail. absence of a rigorously consistent approach to Unless there is evidence of a widespread sloppi- the works. As the author makes plain in his ness on the author's part, however, such things introduction, though, this is deliberate: "I have ought not to be pored over in a review. To do so no single, dominant thesis to propound .... I would be to take up a disproportionate amount have sought, by identifying and attempting to of space and thus give a false impression of the keep in play as many significant threads as pos- work under discussion. sible, to explore as much of the tapestry as I More seriously, there is the matter of Mr could in the space at my disposal.'' If there is no Poole's methodology. Firstly, the "theory" overall vision of Hughes's canon, then, it does chapters sit rather uneasily between those which contain much else which is full of interest. deal with the actual texts. They do contain much There are revelations about Hughes's exploit- interesting material, and for that very reason ation of his source material (in particular about would be much better integrated with the dis- 74 Reviews cussions on the works rather than segregated in The British Novel Since The Thirties: this manner. The second "theory" chapter, in An Introduction, particular, includes much which would have RANDALL STEVENSON. strengthened that on The Fox in the Attic and The Wooden Shepherdess. Then there is the Batsford, 1986, £7.95 (paperback). question of Mr Poole's treatment of unpub- lished material. In a review of Fiction as Truth Randall Stevenson's book "is directed towards (Powys Review, 16) I expressed concern that Mr . . . showing how the novel has developed in Poole was not as stringent as he might have been Britain in the past half-century or so." Steven- in his editorial practice, thinking in particular of son believes that as the present century moves the "Preface to his Poetry" where matter from towards its close there appears to be more need two separate manuscript sources had been inter- " for a general assessment of what has happened cut, without any indication of which was which. in fiction since Joyce wrote." His study assumes In this book, too, arguments are supported by that what has occurred has been qualitatively selective quotation from unpublished material worthwhile, and that practically "there were unavailable to the reader. Unfortunately, this obviously limits to the number of authors who makes it difficult to evaluate such quotation can be discussed in a single volume, and to the oneself, and thus to engage fully with the extent of attention to each." Consequently, author's argument. "major authors' careers are considered in A final reservation concerns another matter detail," non-major authors "are approached where the book makes difficulties for itself. through concentration on one or a few represent- Apart from Peter Thomas's monograph, Mr ative examples of their work." Many of the Poole does not refer directly to a single other authors are still actively writing, their work may critical writing on Richard Hughes. Of course, it well take different directions, and in any case is fair enough for him to consider that this is his Stevenson's concern is "not only with surveying book. Nevertheless, a small corpus of critical the work of individual novelists, but with writing on Hughes does exist—a few dozen indicating general patterns to which their fiction articles and books published in the United States contributes; developments in the vision of the and Europe as well as Britain—and this work novel in the later twentieth century as a whole." would have been the more valuable for entering So those disappointed that their favourite author into discussion with them. This is a pity since, by or novel has been omitted should be able to fit isolating his own discussion from this discourse, them into one or other of the developments Mr Poole weakens rather than strengthens his described in the study which is "intended for own often very good arguments, and is unfair to non-specialist readers—for any interested novel- himself. readers, in fact" in addition to literary students. Thus "conventional terminology" has mostly These cavils apart, however, this is undoubt- been retained throughout although Stevenson's edly the most interesting, as well as the most writing must have been influenced "by the extensive work yet to appear on Richard Hughes. evolution of theories of narrative" produced If somewhat unfocussed as a whole, it is full of over the last two decades or so. insights, is well-written and contains an extremely useful bibliography (up-dated from that which There are six sections to The British Novel appears in Fiction as Truth). Richard Poole and Since the Thirties, references at the end (pp. 231- Poetry Wales Press are to be congratulated on 43), a select bibliography (pp. 244-46) which is this readable and timely introduction to one of annotated, an index (pp. 247-57), author-based Wales's most eminent yet neglected novelists. with titles of novels indexed under their author, and a few concepts indexed such as "allegory", PAUL BENNETT MORGAN "empire, fiction of," and "interior mono- logue." The opening section "The Novel, 1900- 1930" (pp. 11-29) establishes "particular patterns of evolution arising from the situation of the novel" established during the Modernist period of "the first three decades of the century." (p. 7). Conrad and James are early exponents of what became one of the principal features of modernist fiction: "its desertion of Reviews 75 the perspective of the omniscient narrator—in years. On the other hand, those writers whose favour of a more subjective point of view" (p. youth coincided with the 1914-18 War "were 15). Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage (1915-38) more disposed as a result to confront the 'night- is interestingly seen not merely as an "alternative mare' of history not through imaginative or to" realism, but with Compton Mackenzie's aesthetic transformations which partly denied or Sinister Street (1913-14), Maugham's Of Human tried to escape its processes, but through direct, Bondage (1915), and Bennett's Clayhanger political attitudes which sought to transform (1910-18), as late examples of the bildungsroman. reality and historical process themselves" (p. Ford Madox Ford's use "of other characters' 32). reflections" to contribute to "a range of iron- Chapter Three "War and Post-war, 1940- ically disparate versions of events" has been 1956" (pp. 68-122) assesses the developments in overshadowed by the achievements of Lawrence the novel as a response to, and consequence of, and Joyce. The former's concern was largely the 1939-45 War. The first section "The War- with "expansion into new areas of the novel's time Scene: George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, subject-matter" and a development of "new C. S. Forester, J. B. Priestley, Alexander Baron fictional styles for presenting subjectivity" (p. Evelyn Waugh" (pp. 68-76) brings together 17). Joyce's experimentation, technically and in diverse authors and work in terms of subject terms of subject matter, was so diverse and matter, technique and dating. All deal with war- varied that "later novelists were confronted by time experience. Stevenson does refer to the the need to come to terms with the possibility of technical virtuosity of C. S. Forester's devices in divergence from traditional forms and styles The Ship (p. 73) but relies on P. H. Newby's which it had created" (p. 28). accounts in The Novel 1945-50 of Alexander The second chapter "In the Thirties" consists Baron's From the City, From the Plough (1948) of six sections: "Between the Acts, Politics and and omits Baron's other war-time fictional seq- Literature in the Nineteen Thirties" (pp. 30-40); uences. The second section "No Directions: "New Realism and the 'Mild Left': Christopher James Hanley and Henry Green" (pp. 76-81) Isherwood, George Orwell, Graham Greene" focusses on novels which "examine one of the (pp. 34-44); "Fantasy, Marxism and Class: Rex strangest of wartime experiences, the Blitz" (p. Warner, Edward Upward, Walter Greenwood, 77) and "the bizarre effects of the air raids and Lewis Grassic Gibbon" (pp. 44-51); "Satire and their challenge to imagination" (p. 78). How- the Right Wing: Wyndham Lewis and Evelyn ever, in a rather brash and unsubstantiated gen- Waugh" (pp. 51-56): "Politics and Beyond: eralization, Stevenson observes "Green himself Compton Mackenzie, L. H. Myers, Ivy Com- is not only a wartime novelist, but one of the out- pton-Burnett, John Cowper Powys, Malcolm standing English writers of the twentieth Lowry, Rosamund Lehmann, William Ger- century" (p. 74); He notes Green's deletion of hardie" (pp. 56-63). The "Conclusions" (pp. pronouns, conjunctions and adjectives from 63-67), whilst agreeing with conclusions made by Living (p. 86). The four pages on Green (pp. 78- other students of the 1930s such as Hynes and 81) need expanding given the large claims made Bergonzi that "one of the clearest trends of the for him. Green is also included in the third age was to reject modernism in favour of realism section "Innocence and Experience: Henry and political commitment," points out the Green, Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Bowen, obvious fact that "the modernists themselves did L. P. Hartley, P. H. Newby" (pp. 81-93) where not simply cease to write in 1930," and that escape from conflict and anxiety in the creation Elizabeth Bowen, Jean Rhys, Samuel Beckett, of allegory and fantasy focusing on the concern Lawrence Durrell, and Flann O'Brien, amongst with childhood, becomes the central motif. The others, had begun publishing fiction during the fourth section "Good and Evil: Graham Greene, thirties (p. 65). There are some most useful Somerset Maugham, Joyce Cary, Philip Toyn- generalizing insights in this chapter, and in the bee, C. S. Lewis" (pp. 93-105) again uses book as a whole. For instance, Stevenson thematic preoccupation, "good and evil", to remarks that for some modernists the First draw together the works of disparate novels and World War came as an "interruption" to them, novelists. There is some good critical writing and that "the strategy of much of their fiction, present, for instance on Greene (pp. 97-98) and with its intense reliance on memory, may be seen once again a failure to sustain judgement: why as partly directed by a desire to recover or escape one asks is Joyce Cary "even on the strength of back into the benign atmosphere" of pre-war the fresh forces exhibited by Herself Surprised, 76 Reviews To be a Pilgrim and the Horse's Mouth alone... of the century to combining the various strengths one of the best of modern English novelists" (p. of conventional and of innovative fiction which 102)? The next two sections, "Dream Worlds: have been available at least since 1930" (p. 193). C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Mervyn Peake, Chapter Five, "Modernism and Post-mod- Wyndham Lewis" (pp. 105-109), "Self-con- ernism : the Experimental Novel since 1930" (pp. demned: Wyndham Lewis, Malcolm Lowry, 194-224), is divided into five sections and a William Sansom" (pp. 109-15) are self-explan- conclusion. There are worthwhile comments in atory. Stevenson's "Conclusions: The Death of each: "The Autonomy of Language: James the Heart" (pp. 115-22) sees politics as fading Joyce and Samuel Beckett" (pp. 194-200), "Lit- from fiction during and after the war and being erary Reflections: Flann O'Brien and B. S. John- replaced "by a greater concentration on some of son" (pp. 200-203), "The Game of Mirrors: the moral and religious questions . . . which Lawrence Durrell and John Foster" (pp. 203- characterise Victorian novels" (p. 121-22). 209), "The French Connection: John Fowles, There are nine sections and forty novelists Samuel Beckett, Nigel Dennis, Christine Brooke- cited in the fourth chapter "Recent and Con- Rose, Rayner Heppenstall, Giles Gordon" (pp. temporary: The Novel since the Nineteen 209-14). There is too short a section on "Free Fifties" (pp. 123-93). Most are self-explanatory, Narrative: Andrew Sinclair, Julian Mitchell, reflecting a clarity in Stevenson's schematic David Caute, John Berger, Alasdair Gray" (pp. framework. The first focuses on " 'The Angry 214-18). The conclusion to the chapter (pp. 219- Decade': William Cooper, Kingsley Amis, John 24) does not demonstrate Stevenson at his best. Wain, John Braine, Stan Barstow, Alan Silli- Synthesis becomes too formulaic, there is a loss toe" (pp. 123-31), the second is concerned with of accuracy in the attempt to bracket dissimilar "Beyond Fifties Realism: David Storey and writers (see for instance the comments on Beckett Angus Wilson" (pp. 131-36), the third with and Fowles, p. 224). Similarly the "Postscript: "Chronicles: C. P. Snow, Anthony Powell, 'English' Fiction in the Twentieth Century'' (pp. Henry Williamson" (pp. 136-43)—with some 225-30) attempts too much. particularly interesting observations here on Naturally there will be criticism of such an Powell (pp. 140-41). The fourth, rather per- attempt to survey so much. Readers of The functory section, focuses on Ian Fleming, Powys Review will be disappointed in the Paul Scott, J. G. Farrell, Julian Mitchell and the relatively sparse mention of John Cowper Powys literature of "Lost Empire" (pp. 143-49). No and his brothers. They merit less than two pages doubt the last hasn't been heard of this genre of (pp. 59-60). John Cowper is a "unique figure"; fiction, nor of the "New Women" (pp. 149-61) his "prolix style and amalgam of natural and genre, section five, with its eight authors in supernatural, physical and metaphysical, are which Doris Lessing appears as the major figure. illustrated in the extraordinary opening sentence "The Ineluctable Shadow: Susan Hill, Paul of A Glastonbury Romance" (p. 59). Llewelyn Bailey, Olivia Manning, Richard Hughes, gets few words as "a distinguished essayist and Gabriel Fielding, D. M. Thomas" (pp. 161-68), novelist." J. F. Powys was, Stevenson writes, "a uses Walter Allen's superb words from his fine more concise and less clumsy writer than John'', Tradition and Dream to bring together novels whose best-known work is Mr. Weston's Good having in common the shadow of war. Major Wine (p. 60). But then one can't have everything novelists, Golding, Murdoch, Burgess and in life, although John Cowper Powys's 1931 Spark are wedged together in a section "Old study of Dorothy Richardson does get a mention Conflicts and New Synthesis" (pp. 168-84) in a transition passage in Randall Stevenson's which has good perceptions on Burgess (pp. 180- well-written but rather plodding monograph. 82). "Contemporary Gothic" (pp. 184-89) is used to characterize "a Gothic gloom lately deepened by recession and continuing world WILLIAM BAKER violence" (p. 188) exhibited in Spark, Bain- bridge, McEwan, William Trevor, and Martin The Presence of the Past, Amis. In his section "Conclusions: Martin JEREMY HOOKER. Amis, David Lodge, Malcolm Bradbury" (pp. 189-93) Stevenson expresses the belief that "the Poetry Wales Press, 1987, £12.95. English novel in the past two decades has probably come closer than at any previous stage In the sixteen essays which are brought together in this book, the reader is offered a wide range of Reviews 77 critical approaches. The title of the book is taken business of criticism. If Jeremy Hooker displays from the first essay, and although the relation- an unwillingness to get too close to specific ship of the past to contemporary poetry, along political and social issues often raised in with the problem of defining what a sense of connection with poetry elsewhere in this book, history signifies, is a recurring point of reference then "Barbarous Reflections" begins to explain in many of the essays which follow, the over-all why. There is an intellectual impasse here; a nature of the book is to be a series of discrete dis- keen, perceptive sense of the past that sees pol- cussions linked spasmodically by a debate on itical and economic forces shaping our sense of "the diversity, complexity, and tensions of the the present, of "community", of language and historical sense at work in poetry", and by culture. Yet here also is an underlying embar- Jeremy Hooker's sensitive response to the allied rassment turning to despair when the implic- problematic of the function of language as the ations of "explaining" culture in those terms is poet's medium. Of Bunting's "rhythmic order" considered, and when it seems that the future of for example, Hooker writes that he both sees it art might be built on critical foundations that and hears it "in speech, in song, and what he reduce the human condition to such historical hears he recreates, in the poem's corresponding determinants: form." Poetry too can be a destroyer. Again it is the Besides a general concern for the relationship desire for power that kills: the use of a gift to of history to poetry, Hooker discusses the spec- promote and assert the separated self. Under ific case of Anglo-Welsh poetry. He identifies a communism, the State kills or silences poets. creative tension between the traditional, rural Under capitalism, they destroy themselves. historical sense where myth operates as a living force, and a more rigorously polemical Marxist This suggests a writer in the grip of the kind of view of the influence of the past on the present. alienation that can only terminate in frustrated He is quick to point out that there is no crude silence. polarity here. Gwyn A. Williams, the Marxist One of the most refreshing aspects of this historian "understands myth in a sense akin to book is the way unfamiliar names jostle with the the historical lie, although he is fully aware of its familiar and critically acclaimed. An essay on function in shaping history." Williams's T. S. Eliot follows a meticulous discussion of response to R. S. Thomas's poem "Welsh Mary Casey's work. Our opportunity to apprec- History", therefore, is paradoxically both to iate her remarkable talent has now been extend- admire and deplore it. The television series to ed by the publication of her novel, The King- which Williams's book When Was Wales? was fisher's Wing. The appearance of the novel post- linked, served to dramatize the distinct under- dates Hooker's essay, yet much of what he has to standings of how the past exists in the present for say about the theme of "aloneness" evident in Wales through its choice of presenters: in the red the poetry is central to a full appreciation of the corner, Gwyn A. Williams; in the blue corner, novel's recreation of the life of Plotinus. the late Wynford Vaughan Thomas, the pair of Anthony Conran, John Tripp, Robert Minhin- them hitting it off in one of the most unlikely nick and Gillian Clarke are set down alongside partnerships imaginable. R. S. Thomas, David Jones, Geoffrey Hill and The Presence of the Past also contains a good George Oppen, Oppen being discussed in con- deal of detailed discussion of the poetry of siderable detail over two essays. In the case of individual poets, where close reading of the text Geoffrey Wainwright, Hooker is content to do excludes development of the larger historical and little more than offer a brief sketch; the same is political perspectives regularly alluded to. The true of John Tripp. But always the points are book is clearly intended in part to encourage the stimulating as well as informative; the style of reading of a number of less well known poets, these shorter essays tends to one of hints and and Jeremy Hooker's enthusiasms never fail to suggestions. When, for example, we read that in be infectious. "The Birth of Venus at Aberystwyth" John The final piece in the book (not strictly an Ormond is diminishing the distance, "some essay) moves to a genre distinct from those which would say the regressive distance, from Christ- precede it. "Barbarous Reflections" is a series of ian to mythic awareness, and from dogma to confessional fragments by a writer who is essen- archetype", it seems an opportunity missed tially a poet, and it expresses the misgivings that when Hooker does not pursue the contentious arise when the creative mind is drawn into the issue implied by his "some would say regressive" 78 Reviews phrase. Why exactly "regressive"? Who says it? with a much clearer sense of their purpose and Where does the essayist take his stand on this an enhanced sense of what was being achieved. one? One looks for this kind of precision because Hooker's own sense of "the presence of the Hooker clearly declares himself aware that diff- past" becomes apparent; he is prepared to get his erent expressions of historical sense inform the fingers dirty, and there is a strong note of heart of poetic expression, and that the religious positive conviction combined with impressive and political implications have to be recognized; clarity. "I see placelessness", he writes, "which questions are raised that need detailed discussion is now widely increasing or in possession, as an on their own terms, yet so often the essays fail to effect of imperialism and of technological take on the challenge. change .... Poetry of place, whether hieratic or It is with the fourteenth essay, "The Poetry of demotic, historical or mythological, is a poetry Nearness: Anglo-Welsh poetry in the 1960s", of nearness, of presence, of the location of that such issues are indeed squarely faced. For a meaning in people and things." number of reasons this impressive piece might The Anglo-Welsh experience as it is presented usefully have been set much earlier in the book; here provides an analogue for the problems, the many of Hooker's major concerns are crystal- failures and the triumphs, of contemporary ized, and feeling that I was getting to know the British and American poetry. writer and where he stood more clearly enabled me to reread many of the earlier, shorter essays JOHN WILLIAMS

'This extraordinary book deserves the widest acclaim..' Charles Lock THE KINGFISHER'S WING Mary Casey 'This is an absorbing book, and a book to grow into, with understanding . ' Jeremy Hooker

RIGBY & LEWIS PUBLISHING 21, Alexandra Terrace, Teignmouth, South Devon, TQM 8HA

ISBN 1 869887 00 X £9.95 (cased) ISBN 1 869887 31 X £4.95 (paperback) NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

WILLIAM BAKER has lectured at the Hebrew Uni- PATRICIA VAUGHAN DAWSON has contributed versity of Jerusalem, Ben Gurion University, West to numerous periodicals on the visual arts, written and Midlands College, and has also been visiting Prof- collated a series of books and filmstrips for schools essor at Pitzer College, Claremont, California. He called The Artist Looks at Life (Visual Publications) currently teaches at Clifton College, Bristol. He edits and lectured at the Tate Gallery (1963-66). Prints from the George Eliot—George Henry Lewes Newsletter her own etching press are in private and public collect- and is preparing an edition of Lewes's letters to be ions, including The British Museum and La Biblioth- published by Ohio State University Press. eque Nationale. After a visit to Blaenau Ffestiniog in 1978, she wrote and illustrated a poem, La Lanterne TONY BROWN lectures in English at the University desMorts published as a booklet by Ram Press, 1982. College of North Wales, Bangor. He has written on R. S. Thomas in The Welsh Connection, ed. W. Tyde- BARBARA DENNIS has lectured in Canada, man, (Gomer, 1986) and is co-editor of a selection of Durham, and currently at Saint David's University R. S. Thomas's Welsh prose to be published by College, Lampeter. She has published articles on Christopher Davies, 1988. Other publications include Charlotte M. Yonge and other Victorians, and is co- articles on E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot and G. Greene. editor of Reform and Intellectual Debate in Victorian England 1830-1880 (Croom Helm, 1987). GLEN CAVALIERO, a member of the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge, is the author H. W. FAWKNER is a Reader at the University of of John Cowper Powys, Novelist (OUP, 1973), A Goteborg, Sweden. His major publications are Ani- Reading of E. M. Forster (Macmillan, 1979) and mation and Reification in Dickens's Vision of the Charles Williams: Poet of Theology (Macmillan, Life-Denying Society (Stockholm, 1977) and The 1983). His latest publication is an edition of Beatrix Timescapes ofJohn Fowles and The Ecstatic World of Potter's Journals (Warne, 1986). John Cowper Powys (Associated University Presses, 1984 and 1986). PETER CHRISTENSEN lectures in English and film studies at the State University of New York at Binghampton. He is the author of articles on George JOHN HARRIS teaches bibliography at the College Sand, Marguerite Yourcenar, Washington Irving, of Librarianship Wales, Aberystwyth. He has recently Paul Nizan, Lawrence Durrell and Italo Calvino. edited Fury Never Leaves Us: A Miscellany of Caradoc Evans and Caradoc Evans, My People (Poetry Wales Press, 1985 and 1987) and is engaged on JAMES A. DAVIES is a member of the Department a study of Caradoc Evans's literary career. of English, University College of Swansea. He has been a visiting Professor at Baylor University, Texas and is a founder member of the University of Wales ANDREW HASSAM is University of Wales Fellow at Association for the Study of Welsh Writing in Saint David's University College, Lampeter. He has English. He is the author of John Forster: A Literary published studies of George Gissing, B. S. Johnson, Life (1983), Dylan Thomas's Places (Christopher and of reading diaries, in such journals as English Davies, 1987), and numerous articles and reviews on Literature in Transition, Prose Studies and Toronto Victorian literature and Welsh writing in English. He Quarterly. His fiction has appeared in Ambit. He is is currently completing The Textual Life of Dickens's currently preparing a study of diary-fiction. Characters for Macmillan. CEDRIC HENTSCHEL lectured in the Universities PETER DAVISON has lectured at the Universities of of London, Breslau, Innsbruck and Uppsala before Sydney and Birmingham, and held chairs at Lampeter joining the overseas service of the British Council. His and Kent. A former editor of The Library, his pub- writings in the field of Anglo-German studies include lications reflect interests in editorial method, Shakes- ' 'John Cowper Powys and the Gretchen Cult", Studia peare and Renaissance drama, modern European Neophilologica, 1941, Alexander von Humboldt's drama, film, music and popular culture. His recent Synthesis of Literature and Science (Inter Nationes, studies include Contemporary Drama and the 1969), TheByronic Teuton (Methuen, 1940; Norwood Popular Dramatic Tradition in England and Popular Editions, 1978) and an article in Byron's Political and Appeal in English Drama to 1850 (Macmillan, 1982) Cultural Influence in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. and Henry V (Macmillan, 1987). A number of P. G.Trueblood (Macmillan, 1981). He edited Powys volumes in his new edition of George Orwell's writings to Eric the Red (Sven-Erik Tachmark) (Cedric Woolf, have been published. 1983). 80 Notes on Contributors BEN JONES is a Professor of English at Carleton articles on Vladimir Nabokov. He is currently re- University, Ottawa. His publications include the searching Richard Hughes. edition (with J. Downey) of essays on Thomas Gray, Fearful Joy (McGill—Queen's U.P., 1974). He is editing a collection of essays on Nietzsche and GARETH ROBERTS is a former University of Wales continuing to write on J. C. Powys, Frances Gregg, Fellow and currently lectures at the University of and critical theory. Exeter. He has published numerous articles on the use of reference to magic and witchcraft in renaissance drama, poetry and prose. CHARLES LOCK is an Assistant Professor of English, Erindale College, University of Toronto. His D. Phil, thesis, Oxford, was on the "Development of JOHN WILLIAMS is a Senior lecturer in English with Style in the Writings of J. C. Powys 1915-1929". He the School of Humanities at Thames Polytechnic. A has published articles on J. C. Powys, G. M. Hopkins member of the Powys Society, he has lectured at the and T. Hardy. Summer Conference on Theodore and John Cowper Powys. His most recent publication is Twentieth- PAUL BENNETT MORGAN is on the staff of the Century British Poetry: A Critical Introduction National Library of Wales. His publications include (Edward Arnold, 1987). a Tftalamecje-'- RABELAIS Sa vie, son oeuvre et une interpretation de son genie et de sa religion

For the first time in French John Cowper POWYS's shatteringly prophetic treatment of the "father and mother" of French prose

When reading this book one has a shock: all the pieces of the puzzle of French political and intellectual life during the past five centuries suddenly fall into place and reveal a pattern of indisputable logic.

ca 326 pages Illustrated Translated by Catherine Lieutenant 1000 numbered copies, of which 900 are for sale.

Subscription price, until March 1, 1988 Belgian Francs 750 After this date Belgian Francs 950

If ordering directly from the publishers, please add Bfcs 85 for postage. P.O. Box 170 4800 Verviers (Belgium) Telephone 087/33.01.28 (to become 23.03.28 at an uncertain date) Post Account Number 000-1585768-12 THE POWYS SOCIETY (President. Glen Cavaliero)

The Powys Society exists to promote the study and appreci- ation of the work of the Powys family, especially that of John Cowper Powys, T. F. Powys and Llewelyn Powys. Meetings are held three times a year, two in London; the third is a weekend conference in a provincial centre. Members receive copies of The Powys Review containing papers read to the Society and other material. The Review will be published twice a year.

The annual membership subscription is £10.00 (U.K.) and £12.00 (abroad).

Further details may be obtained from Griffin Beale Susan Rands Hon. Secretary, The Powys Society, Hon. Treasurer, The Powys Society, 39 Church Street, Victoria Farm, Bridgewater, Bradley Lane, Somerset. TA6 5AT Glastonbury, Somerset. BA6 8LW

I enclose , or its equivalent in my own currency, being my subscription for this year.

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GOMER THE WELSH CLASSICS: Two of the most notable figures in Anglo- Welsh literature: Volume 1 Dafydd ap Gwilym: Poems Gwyn Williams Rachel Bromich xxxi, 207pp 0 85088 815 8 Collected Poems 1936 -1986 £9.75 Case-bound xviii, 184 pp 0 86383 324 1 £10.95 Case-bound "This is a book to read and read again ... and a book to ' 'A Welsh patriot, whose culture is at once intensely local and treasure.'* richly cosmopolitan." (R. Brinley Jones, Welsh Books and Writers) {The Oxford Companion to the Literature of Wales)

Volume 2 Hywel Dda: The Law Raymond Garlick Dafydd Jenkins Collected Poems 1946-86 xlvii, 425pp 0 86383 277 6 165pp 0 86383 318 7 £14.95 Case-bound £3.95 Paper-back "The modest, crisp elegance of Raymond Garlick." An admirably lucid and accessible translation which pays (New Penguin Guide to Literature, Vol. 8) tribute to the intrinsic literary quality of one of the great glories of medieval Wales. "In Raymond Garlick, an appeal to Europe— source to which our ballads grope "... a new, often exciting understanding of what was and context, compass-card what might have been ... the scholarship is impressive and and hope the venture well worthwhile." over the heads of London and Gomovvah." (D. G. T. Williams, The Cambridge Law Journal) (The Times)

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